


your love, your pieces

by Wisteria_Leigh



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Anxiety, Blood and Gore, College Student Adam Parrish, Eating at diners for special occasions, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Fluff and Angst, Grief/Mourning, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, M/M, Making out on a Twin XL Standard-Issue College Bed, Panic Attacks, Past Abuse, Post-The Raven King, Smashing Plates, Tequila Shots at a Frat Party, Trauma, Yelling in a cornfield, occasional demonic presence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-24
Updated: 2019-04-29
Packaged: 2020-01-31 05:19:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 8
Words: 29,045
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18584569
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Wisteria_Leigh/pseuds/Wisteria_Leigh
Summary: It comes. A door. It comes.Whispers in his ears, vines curling against his skin--Adam shivered and wrapped his arms around his core. That was how Cabeswater used to speak to him.But this had not been Cabeswater. This was something else. Something far less friendly. And Adam did not want to find out what.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to [Kay](https://cosmiccluck.tumblr.com/) for the [ delightful artwork to accompany this piece ](https://cosmiccluck.tumblr.com/post/184412086522/blows-a-wonky-fanfare-hello-welcome-to-my), and [ Bet ](https://onedowntownblock.tumblr.com/) for beta reading, and both of them for being a great team to work with for this Big Bang.
> 
> Title is from "Play Out" by Zola Blood (a song you can find on [ the playlist for this fic ](https://open.spotify.com/user/seholland92/playlist/4JCKq6x8Fu0S6FzvmTC4xB?si=hAO0QpfYQPGa0Ye6SVDDzw))

It started with a fire. 

In late July, there was a lightning strike. Or maybe it was a negligent camper. Or possibly a runaway firework left over from 4th of July.

Regardless of cause, a spark turned into a flame, which turned into a blaze, which spread like a rash up and down the Blue Ridge Mountains. The spark lept from one patch to the next, from Woodstock down to Roanoke and back again, and left the mountains smoking for weeks.

“Think this is going to fuck with the line?” Ronan Lynch asked one stifling August day as he tended to the flower garden around the farmhouse porch.  

“It’s the worst wildfire in recent history. I’m more concerned that the line caused it,” Adam Parrish replied. He sat on the porch swing with sweet tea and an old book of Irish poetry he’d found in the house; Adam was far more interested in watching Ronan weed than he was in the book, but he couldn’t very well say that aloud.

Ronan scoffed, and pulled another handful of weeds. Dirt scattered. He wiped his forehead with the back of his arm. “Why the fuck would it destroy itself?”

Adam shrugged. “It let a 17-year-old become its hands and eyes, so. Not exactly the smartest magical object.”

Cicadas whirred in the treeline. Ronan cursed and ripped a family of wild onion from the garden. A carpenter bee bumbled along the porch railing.  

“Maybe it needs a refresh. You know, wants to build the soil nutrients back up,” Adam said.

Ronan grunted and yanked out another plant. “Maybe it’s trying to mess with the pipeline builders. Tell ‘em to fuck off.”

“Who knew it was such an eco-warrior. That was a flower, by the way.”

“No it wasn’t.”

“That’s a daffodil bulb.”

“How the fuck would you know?”

“Because I planted them.”

Ronan grumbled something that sounded like seven unique variations of “fuck,” scrubbed the sweat from his forehead with the hem of his muscle tank, and carefully replanted the bulb.

A breeze blew through The Barns, hot and sticky and thick with honeysuckle. Ronan hauled himself over the porch railing. He gulped down half of the tea before Adam could snatch it back with a glare and then threw himself into a wicker chair. “Think we should check on Cabeswater II?” Ronan asked.

Adam put the book on the table. “Wouldn’t hurt. Opal’ll be happy.”

“Brat,” Ronan said with a snort that meant he cared.

“Wanna go today?”

“Why the hell not. Maybe it’ll be cooler in there.”

“It’s only 80 degrees in New Haven today,” Adam said.

Ronan scoffed. “Don’t fucking remind me, you goddamn yankee. C’mon. Wanna shower? I’m gross as shit.”

He took off his tank, soaked with sweat and covered in dirt, and threw it at Adam’s head. Adam batted it away with a grimace. “Disgusting. You’re going to actually shower before I get in there, right?”

Ronan only laughed.

  
  


#####

  
  


At the end of July, the fires started. And in early August, something  ate half of the cow named Hurricane.  

Ronan found the carcass. And he was  _ pissed _ . So he did what any self-respecting livestock farmer would do: dream up a very plump, very stupid, and very fake cow to lure the predator to him.  He planted the cow in the pasture and spent all night in the hayloft watching for murderous beasts. He expected a wolf. Maybe a bobcat. Possibly Bigfoot.

It was none of those things. It was a--well, he wasn’t exactly sure  _ what _ it was. But it was big, bloodthirsty, and howled like a chorus of screaming babies and angry geese.

“That’s a…very specific simile,” Adam said, scrubbing his eyes in the harsh lamplight after Ronan shook him awake at eleven PM. 

“I just told you about a demon predator that’s been  _ near our house _ , and your only takeaway was what the fucker sounded like?” Ronan replied.

Adam paused. “Did you just say ‘our’?”

“Don’t change the fucking subject,” Ronan snapped, but his blush was more than telling.

Ronan, being Ronan, wanted to avenge his livestock. And Adam, being Adam, got a bowl of grape juice and was ready to scry for the cow eater’s location. “Once I find it, we can go,” Adam said.

“No, once you find it,  **_I_ ** will go,” Ronan countered.

Adam  raised a brow. “Excuse me?”

“This thing is dangerous. You’ve got school. You are not putting yourself at risk, even if it’s to bring justice to poor Hurricane’s name.”

“No.”

“No?”

“No. I’m coming. Someone needs to track it. That someone is me. I’m not fighting about this,” Adam said. And that should have been an effective concluding argument had they not proceed to fight about it again after he scryed. And again on the way to the car. And again, and again, and again. 

The ley line led them (led Adam, more specifically, “which is why I needed to come with you, so stop being such an asshole”) to Pembroke, a scraggly town deep into the heart of Virginia’s Appalachia. Adam directed Ronan down twisting back roads of dilapidated farmhouse and condemned trailer parks until they reached the end of the road: a trail in Jefferson National Forest called The Cascades. 

“So it likes hiking,” Ronan muttered, pulling into the empty and very-much-off-limits-during-off-hours gravel parking lot. “Fucking great.”

“More like it can’t travel far from the ley line,” Adam replied, closing his eyes and reaching tentatively for the energy that thrummed beneath them. It wasn’t hard to feel; they were directly on top of the line, in what felt like one of the most powerful spots in Appalachia. “C’mon. It’s headed up the creek.”

“Wait wait wait,” Ronan said. “Say that again.”

“Say what again?”

“What you just said. Say it again.”

Adam didn’t need perfect hearing to catch the god-awful smirk in his voice.

“It’s headed up the creek,” he repeated, far more carefully this time.

“Bullshit. You said ‘crick’ the first time.”

“Seriously? Stop dicking around and let’s go,” Adam sighed--not without fondness--as he grabbed a maglite from the back seat. 

Ronan paused at the head of the trail. “D’you smell that?” 

Adam did: it was smoke. 

“Did the fires reach this far down?” Ronan asked. 

“No,” Adam said. “They did not.”

They trekked the well-worn trail in the earliest hours of the morning, following the rushing river deeper and deeper into the forest. Ronan stormed ahead, beating back brush that was not at all in the way with his nail-laden baseball bat (“Isn’t this thing fucking awesome? Saw it in a TV show. Dreamed one up that’s indestructible. Y’know. Just in case,” he had explained when pulling it from the trunk of the car with such incredible nonchalance that Adam had almost believed it wasn’t  _ seriously concerning  _ that he had this crazy weaponized bat, just,  _ in his car  _ for  _ whenever _ .) 

The air was thick as soup, as they marched along to the cacophony of crickets and cicadas. “I could have done this without you, is all I’m saying,” Ronan said, clearly unwilling to let this fight be laid to rest until Adam surrendered. As Adam Parrish would  _ ever  _ surrender in a fight when he knew he was right. 

“Oh really? And how, exactly, did you plan on tracking this thing?”

“I had some ideas,” Ronan muttered.

“Yes, because as we all know, Ronan Lynch Certified Ideas work out so well.”

Ronan whipped around to face him. “You have _ no  _ fucking idea what we’re dealing with, Parrish,” he snarled.

“Neither do you,” Adam replied evenly, without a flicker of uncertainty.

Ronan glared at him, but turned back around with a huff and started stomping his way up the trail again. “Stupid fucking psychic,” he grumbled.

“Doesn’t take a psychic to figure that out, Lynch,” Adam said. “You know we have a better chance of figuring this out if we do it together. So stop whatever this shitty bravado act is, for Christ’s sake.”

“Yeah, yeah, ‘we’re a team’ or whatever that Dick Gansey bullshit is,” Ronan growled, running up a set of inlaid stone stairs. “Stop reciting Hallmark Cards and keep up.”

They heard The Cascades’ namesake waterfall before they saw it. Ronan suddenly shoved Adam behind a rock, took his Maglite, and shut it off.  

“It’s here,” he whispered, voice barely audible above the roar of the falls.

Adam looked around the rock.

It was a dog. No. It was a spider. No. It was a shadow. No. It was….

A monster. A nightmare.

“What. The fuck. Is that,” Adam whispered. Ronan elbowed him a little too hard and raised a finger to his lips.

Too many legs. Too many teeth. Eyeshine that was too bright a red to be natural. And its edges were fuzzy. Not in the way that Noah had been: oddly intangible even when solid. These edges looked like…static. Like this thing couldn’t hit the right frequency. It smelled like fire and rot. 

“You sure you didn’t pull this thing from your dreams?”

“Sure as shit,” Ronan hissed. “Now shut up or it’ll hear us.”

“Does it even have ears?”

“Wanna test it, dumbass? Keep talking and we may find out.”

Adam pushed past him, crouching as he moved closer despite Ronan’s protests.

The creature was bent over the water, possibly drinking from it. Adam wasn’t sure that this thing, whatever it was, was capable of consuming anything.

The rocks along the shoreline were slippery from the constant, ice-cold spray of the waterfall. Ronan slipped with a vehement curse.

The beast’s head snapped to attention. They froze, but it was too late. It shrieked. Exactly like infant cries and screaming geese. Adam’s breath caught in his chest. He dropped the Maglite.  

“Told you!” Ronan shouted, and readied his bat.

The beast charged.

Adam ran.

Ronan swung.

The bat collided with its side, and the creature–whose shape was no more defined up close–let out a cry that hurt even Adam’s deaf ear. It fell backwards, claws scraping against the stone.

Adam ducked behind a rock. If this thing was like other creatures they’d dealt with, it wouldn’t like light very much. The Maglite. If he could get to it….

Ronan landed another hit. Adam scrambled for the light. His converse had no traction. His feet slipped from beneath him. Pain shot through his arm as he landed, hard, on the rocks. And he kept sliding. He turned the light on with one hand, and clawed for a grip in the slimy rocks with the other. He found none. He flung the light up the rocks. The creature shrieked. 

And then he fell.

Rushing water, black as ink; ice cold like a punch to the gut, so much colder than it should be in August. Something touched his arm, his leg, his cheek. Slimy and thick, like vines. Water deafened his right ear, whispers flooded his left. Hissing and biting in a language he didn’t know but could still understand.  

_ A door. A door. It comes, it comes.  _

He flailed desperately for an edge, a crack, something,  _ anything.  _ His fingers found purchase. He hauled himself out of the current with a gasp. 

“Adam, Jesus,” Ronan cried, pulling Adam further onto the rocks. 

“The thing–” Adam coughed.

Ronan turned. The creature was scrambling up the rocks face, blood black as ink oozing down the wall in its wake. It crested over the edge and, with a howl like nails on a chalkboard, scurried into the forest above.

Ronan cursed and ran to follow.

Adam shivered on the shore, soaked to the bone.

_ It comes. A door. It comes. _

Whispers in his ears, vines curling against his skin...he shivered and wrapped his arms around his core. That was how Cabeswater had spoken to him.

But this had not been Cabeswater. This was something else. Something far less friendly. And Adam did not want to find out what.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> buckle up, friends. It's about to be a bumpy ride.
> 
> If you're looking to set the mood for this fic, I suggest reading it in the dark with a black candle burning while listening to this [ special playlist I made specifically for this fic ](https://open.spotify.com/user/seholland92/playlist/4JCKq6x8Fu0S6FzvmTC4xB?si=RZ-LRuyuQZel_zvkzzX9qw).


	2. Chapter 2

Yale didn’t care about cow-eating monsters and suspicious wildfires. School began, as it always did, during the last week of August. As they packed up the Hondoyota, Ronan and Adam agreed to a strict visitation schedule. Ronan would visit for Fall Break, Adam would visit for his birthday, and Thanksgiving was dependent on Sargent, Cheng, and Gansey. 

Surprise visits, however, were not regulated. Exactly how Ronan liked them. Because by the end of September he was getting pretty fucking tired of not being able to kiss Adam’s pretty face. Good thing that was an easy problem to fix with a 6 hour drive.  

The last weekend in September, Ronan Lynch walked through the doors of Sterling Memorial Library like he owed the damn place.   

He hunched his shoulders as he sneered his way through the lobby with Chainsaw perched on his shoulder. The barricades prevented him from going further than the entrance desk, so he stopped. At the desk sat a girl with platinum hair pulled into tight french braids. She wore a blue and white Yale Volleyball pinnie. Obviously a jock. Ronan hated jocks. He pinched his expression and wrapped his knuckles on the art history textbook she was reading.   

The girl glanced up to look him up and down; one penciled-in eyebrow quirked.

“Yes?” she drawled as she turned back to her book.

“I’m looking for Adam Parrish,” Ronan growled.

She highlighted a paragraph in her book. “He’s reshelving,” she told him. “He’ll probably be back in 5, maybe 10 minutes. You have an ID?”

“ID?”

“Yale ID.”

“Why the fuck would I need that?” Ronan bit out.

“Do you want to come into the library?”

“Yes.”

She gestured to the barricades. “That’s why.”

“What happens if I don’t have an ID?” Ronan said.

“Give you three guesses, smartass,” she replied with a sigh, and finally turned her attention back to Ronan. Or, to be more precise, turned her attention to Chainsaw.  

She tapped the pink highlighter against her thin lips. “Is that a service animal?” she asked after a moment.

“It’s a bird.”

“I’ve seen weirder. Is she a service animal?”

“The fuck does it matter?”

“Because there are rules about pets being in buildings.”

Ronan scoffed. Chainsaw chirped.  “What, you expect me to get my bird a vest or some shit?”

“Yes. Or, if she doesn’t like vests, you could just carry paperwork around with you. I’m flexible.”

Ronan paused. “How’d you know she’s a girl?”

“She looks like one.”

“She looks like a  _ bird _ .”

“Kerah,” Chainsaw noted, and bit his ear. Traitor.  

“You’ve offended your service bird,” the girl noted with a smirk.  

The elevator dinged. An empty wood cart stumbled out of the door, pushed by the delicate, knobby hands of fine-boned Adam Parrish. He looked a little disheveled, a little tired, and a lot like fucking perfection. Ronan swallowed.

“Someone snuck coffee upstairs again,” Adam said as he approached the desk. He’d been sick a few weeks ago, and the rasp lingered. Just a bit. Only on certain words. Ronan didn’t know how to feel about it.

That was a lie: he knew  _ exactly  _ how he felt about it, but thinking about it would make him blush in front of this snarky-ass stranger and Ronan would rather Chainsaw peck out his eyeballs than deal with that sort of humiliation.

“I mean, honestly, is it really that hard to read and obey a damn sign?” Adam said.

“Apparently,” the girl replied with a lopsided smile. “You throw it out?”

“Of course.”

“What was it?”

Adam parked the cart by a shelf of on-hold books. “Venti Starbucks something-or-other. Probably eight bucks.”

“Nice.”

Chainsaw cawed.

Adam’s gaze snapped to the girl, and then to the bird behind her. His jaw dropped.

“Holy shit. Ronan?”

“Parrish.” Ronan smirked. Worth it.

“Holy shit. What the hell.” The constant pinch between his brows melted, his shoulders slumped in disbelief, and his mouth stretched into his elastic, amiable smile. Ronan’s heart skipped a beat. Definitely worth it.

“My Friday freed up,” Ronan said with a practiced shrug.

“This the boyfriend?” the girl asked.

“Yeah,” Adam said. He didn’t take his eyes off Ronan.

“Hm. Surprising.”

“I have another half hour in my shift,” Adam said to Ronan, breathless and flustered and  _ god damn  _ was this worth it. “You can just--”

“I’ll cover it,” the girl said.  

That caught Adam’s attention. “Corinne, no, you don’t have to--”

“No big deal.”

“But--”

“I’m avoiding homework, a roommate who’s probably fucking someone right now, and a volleyball-lacrosse mixer in a basement that has probably stored dead bodies at one point or another. Trust me; you’re doing me a favor.”

Adam’s face flickered with indecision. Ronan knew that look. His time/money/how-much-will-this-set-me-back look.

Corinne must’ve known it too, because after a second she added, “I’ll clock you out, don’t worry about it. Just don’t tell anyone or else I’ll get fired. And then you’ll really owe me.”

Adam conceded. Or, at least compromised. “Okay. Let me return this stack first.”

“Adam--”

“Just this one, I promise, and then I’m gone.”

“Good.”

Adam glanced at Ronan again, smiled his lovely, perfect, setting-fucking-oceans-on-fire smile, and shook his head. He trundled the loaded cart back into the depths of the library.

Corinne turned to Ronan. Her slender fingers toyed with her necklace: a delicate silver chain threaded through a thin black ring. “Nice surprise,” she said. “Wouldn’t expect you to be the romantic sort.”

Ronan scoffed. “You don’t know shit about me.”

“Do you know have any idea how much Adam talks about you? Like, any sense at all.”

“Probably too busy nerding out about school to talk about me. Whatever, I don’t care,” Ronan grumbled, but the blush across his cheeks was more than telling (which,  _ fuck _ his pale Irish complexion). Corinne rolled her eyes.

“You here the whole weekend?”

Ronan grunted.

“Can you make sure Adam sleeps? And eats? More than just an apple and a bag of chips?”

Ronan grunted again.

“And force him to relax for, like, half a second. He’s been more uptight that usual. It’s annoying.”

The last time he’d seen Adam--a video chat a few weeks ago--Adam had been battling the campus plague. So compared to that, he was practically glowing with vitality.

Ronan didn’t feel the need to tell this random girl that, though. So he grunted.

“Seriously? Are you a caveman?”

Grunt.

Corinne sighed. “Look. You just showed up here from bumfuck Virginia to surprise Adam, so you can wipe off that patina of ‘fuck the fuck off.’ It’s not uncool to care.”

“Who the  _ fuck  _ says  _ patina _ ,” Ronan snarled.

“Ah! He speaks! A miracle! Now listen. About Adam.”

“What about him. So he’s fucking tired. Have you met him?”

“As a matter of fact, I  _ have _ met him! What a  _ coincidence _ ,” Corinne gasped, with sarcasm so finely honed it was like being skewered.

Ronan really did not like this girl.

“It’s not  _ just  _ that he’s tired,” she continued. “He’s been weird lately.”

“He’s always weird.”

“ _ Yes, _ I’m aware. But, like, weirder than usual. Which means he’s been pretty fucking weird.”

“And why are you telling me this? I’m not Parrish’s keeper.”

“Yeah and I’m not his mom. But here we are,” Corinne shot back. “Listen. Sophomore year is brutal as shit. And I worry about him. And since you  _ are _ his boyfriend, I figured you’d be worried, too. But sorry for thinking you might be a vaguely compassionate and caring individual.”

Ronan smirked. “How fucking dare you.”

Corinne rolled her eyes. “Just keep an eye on him.”

Ronan grunted.

Corinne squeezed her highlighter in her fist. “And if you’re going to keep loitering, scare off anyone with a coffee cup.”

He glared at her, but she was already highlighting another line in her book and paying him absolutely no attention.

The elevator dinged. Adam parked the cart behind the desk once more. “Are you sure you’re okay with this?” he asked Corinne.

“Yes, and if you ask me again, I’m going to take all your shifts from now until winter break. Now go canoodle with your boyfriend and get out of my library.”

Adam heaved his backpack onto one shoulder and pushed through the turnstile.  

“Have fun,” Corinne sang. “And get your bird a vest or else I’ll kick you out next time.”

Ronan flipped her off. “She’s fucking annoying,” he grumbled as they stepped into the brisk night.

“Why, because she doesn’t deal with your shitty attitude?” Adam replied, weaving his fingers into Ronan’s.

“Fuck off. No. She seems like a dick.”

“She is. But you’re a dick and I still like you.”

Ronan hip-checked him. Adam checked him back.

It was warm, still, for late September, but a crispness cut through the air; a bite they could smell as they wandered through campus to Jonathan Edwards College. The trees hadn’t turned yet, but soaked in golden light from yellow street lamps looked as if they were already well into fall.

Ronan wasn’t one be taken aback by classical beauty. But,  _ damn, _ if the Gothic architecture of Yale didn’t give him goosebumps. Or maybe that was just Adam’s thumb gently running up and down the soft skin of his hand. Hard to tell.

They passed packs of students, dressed like it was still July, laughing and shouting as they headed downtown. A few called out to Adam. He waved, bashful. Ronan glared. 

“You have too many friends,” he decided.

Adam quirked a brow. “Jealous?”

“Only if they’re not dicks. Unlike Corinne.”

“You remembered her name,” Adam said, swiping into the residential college, “so clearly you don’t hate her that much.”

“Did I say Corinne? I meant ‘that dick at the library’.”

“If you keep calling her a dick, I’m going to have to tell her.”

“Snitches get stitches, Parrish.”

Chainsaw bit Ronan’s ear, and then took off to hunt.

Adam lived in a 4-person suite with 3 of his friends from freshman year. He shared a room with Colton Wolfe, an athletic scholarship student from Pennsyltucky with fair hair and thick square-frame glasses. A soccer player. Freshman year, they spent long hours in the library together, Adam helping him with European history and Colton helping Adam with physics. He listened to Colton gush about Julie Lewis, pushed him to ask her to the soccer formal, and gave him emergency condoms when he showed up at his dorm room one night face as red as a tomato.

Colton was the first person at school to find out about Ronan. He tossed Adam an X-Box controller, said “cool, thanks for telling me,” and proceeded to kick his ass in Rocket League. He let Adam sleep over or study in his room when Adam’s freshman year roommate was having too-loud sex or yelling slurs and profanities at his competitors in Call of Duty. Living together was an obvious choice, and a far better arrangement than either had first year.

There was a small common room in the suite, full of mismatched furniture from thrift stores and free-and-for-sale groups on Facebook, and decorated with bits and pieces from each resident. Potted plants, soccer posters, Polaroids, and christmas lights. Gothic windows covered by curtains someone’s great aunt made, creaking wood floors covered with mismatched rugs from Target, a fireplace decorated with tinsel garland and empty liquor bottles. It looked absurd. It didn’t look like a single person living here had any sense of design or aesthetic. It looked like Adam’s St. Agnes apartment might have had he any money or any care to make the space more than just four walls and a ceiling.

It looked like home.

Ronan squeezed Adam’s hand a little tighter.

Adam’s door was open, filling the common space with overplayed pop music that made Ronan’s teeth grind. “Adam!” someone cheered.

A girl sat cross-legged on Colton’s bed. There was a bottle of two-buck chuck on the desk, nearly two-thirds gone, and a cheap plastic cup in her hand. Half her bobbed ink-black hair was pulled into a messy topknot. Fine glitter shone along her cheekbones.    

“Hey Jules,” Adam replied, dropping his backpack at his desk. The overhead fluorescents were off in favor of an Ikea lamp more duct tape than plastic Colton had found in the throwaway pile during move-out last year, and the white fairy lights they’d strung around edge of the ceiling. “This is Ronan. Ronan, Julie.”

“Nice to meet you,” Julie said with a sparkling smile. Ronan grunted in reply.

Julie’s smile twitched. She turned to Adam. “You weren’t kidding about him,” she said pointedly.

Adam shrugged. Ronan snorted.

“Where’s Colton?” he asked. Ronan toed off his boots and hopped onto Adam’s bed.

“Grabbing a textbook from Matt’s room. He’ll be back in a minute.”

“You going out tonight?” Adam said.

“Yeah. Lacrosse and volleyball mixer,” Julie replied with a sigh. “I hate lacrosse players. Colton, look who’s here!”

Colton stepped through the threshold, tossing a textbook onto the bed with a thud.

“Oh, Adam, hey,” he said. “Thought you were at the library until eleven tonight.”

“Corinne took the rest. Uh, Ronan’s here. Sorry,” Adam said, rubbing the back of his neck.

“No worries, he texted me a few days ago. Hey, man, how’s it going?” He held out a fist for Ronan. Ronan pounded it.

“Ronan texted you?” Adam asked, completely bewildered.

“Didn’t want you to seem like a shit roommate,” Ronan said with a shrug.

A small smile pulled at the edges of Adam’s mouth.

“Wait, Corinne’s not even going to this thing?” Julie cried. “Who am I supposed to dance with?”

“Me?” Colton said, hopping on the bed next to Julie. She passed him the bottle of wine.

“No, you suck at dancing.”

“Wow. Thanks.”

Adam laughed. A true, joyous sound, one that Ronan hadn’t heard come so easily since this summer.

It struck him, all at once, watching Adam, Julie, and Colton quip back and forth; relaxing into the companionable silences that came with any conversation; touching Adam’s healthy, thriving plants and the old quilt from the Barns he’d somehow stolen without Ronan knowing: he’d rarely seen Adam so comfortable. So awake. So present.

He took Adam’s hand and kissed his knuckles. Adam’s attention snapped to Ronan, a question in his eyes and a smirk on his lips.  _ What was that for? _

_ Because I love you.  _ An answer Ronan didn’t have to say. Adam blushed anyways.

“Colton,” Julie sang, hopping off the raised bed. “If we’re swinging by Lisa’s, we gotta go now.”

Colton nodded. “See you guys later,” he said.

“Nice to meet you, Ronan!” Julie said. “Be safe you two!”

“Christ, Jules,” Colton sighed. “Sorry,” he mouthed as he shut the door.

Ronan looked at Adam. Adam was already looking back. “So that was Colton and Julie,” he said.

“No shit,” Ronan snorted.

“Just a heads up, she won’t stop bugging you until you’re nice to her.”

Ronan grunted. “I have too many fucking friends as is,” he said. “No space for another unless Dick kicks it again.”

Adam rolled his eyes. “Asshole,” he muttered, and then grabbed Ronan’s legs and pulled him to the edge of the bed, standing between his thighs and kissing hard enough to knock the breath from Ronan’s lungs.

“They coming back?” Ronan asked, finally breaking apart, both breathless and flushed and wanting more more  _ more _ . 

Adam looked at Colton’s desk, brow furrowed. “Colton took his glasses case, I think,” he replied. “Usually means he’s staying the night with Julie.”

“Good. I really don’t want to be interrupted.”

“Oh yeah? And why’s that?”

Ronan kissed and sucked at Adam’s neck, then hopped off the bed and spun Adam around so Adam’s back was against the bed, to then kiss his collar bone, and sternum, and rib cage, and down further and further--

Ah. That’s why.

 

####

  
  


They lay tangled on Adam’s standard-issue dorm room bed, shirts and jeans tossed unceremoniously on the floor, trailing fingertips along pale skin, mapping constellations in freckle clusters. 

Adam’s eyes were closed, but Ronan knew he wasn’t sleeping. Enjoying this moment, maybe. More likely thinking, with the way he was chewing on his lower lip.

Corinne’s appeal whispered in the back of his mind.

“How was your day?” Ronan asked softly, watching Adam’s face to see if he could catch a small twist of his lip or furrow in his brow before he pulled on a mask.

Adam smirked, but didn’t open his eyes. “Fine,” he said, and it didn’t feel like a lie. “Exponentially better now that you’re here.”

Ronan hummed, obviously pleased with that answer.

“How’s school?” he continued.

“School is fine,” Adam said with a laugh.

“And your roommates?”

Adam opened his eyes and quirked an eyebrow at Ronan. “Are you seriously trying small talk right now?”

Ronan shrugged. Adam rolled his eyes.

“Good. Wish I had more plants in here.”

“You already have a plant.” Ronan nudged the pot with his toe.

“Yeah but. I don’t know. I feel like something’s still missing.”

“You just need to grow a full fucking forest in here. Think Colton would be okay with a tree in the middle of the room?”

“Probably about as okay as he is with your punk ass kicking him out for the weekend.”

“Fuck you,” Ronan said with a sharp smile, arm hooked around Adam’s neck as he rolled him closer.

“Wouldn’t mind that,” Adam hummed against his lips.

“Needy bastard,” Ronan quipped, smiling through the kiss as Adam’s fingers slid beneath his waistband. A mere brush of his fingertips in the right spot and Ronan’s smirk was replaced with a far more reverent expression.

Thank God Colton had taken his glasses with him.


	3. Chapter 3

Adam didn’t plan on telling Ronan his mom called.  

It had been right at the start of the semester. Week two. Thursday. Right after one of his labs. He’d been walking back to his residence college with Julie and another friend of theirs, laughing about some video they’d watched on Youtube. His phone buzzed in his pocket once, twice. An unknown number. 540 area code.

He froze.

“Adam?” Julie said.

He swallowed.

“What’s up?”

Time stretched like a taffy pull.

“Go ahead. I’ll catch up,” he said.

He shouldn’t have answered. Should have let it go to voicemail. They wouldn’t leave a message. Wasn’t their style. And then he could have erased it all from his memory.

He pressed the green button.

“Adam?” she said. And the world around him ceased to exist.

It’s not like they wanted anything unusual. It was his mom, asking for money. Fifty dollars. Something about how his dad had lost some amount of it, maybe it was stolen or maybe he spent it on wildly unnecessary things he considered must-haves or maybe they just never had the money in the first place. Whatever. It was all the same. It was always the same.

“No,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

“I don’t think you are,” she replied.

“You’re right. I’m not.”

He hung up.

He went straight to the computer lab, and shoved his ear bud in as far as it would go. He typed up outlines for essays not due for weeks, and scribbled down problem sets with shaking hands. He ate dinner alone. He went back to his suite with his headphone in. He didn’t talk to anyone.

“You good?” Colton asked.

Adam nodded. It wasn’t like they called him just to tell him how worthless he was, or how disappointing, or to reach through the phone and grab him by the shirt collar and slam him up against the wall for cursing when he dropped a plate. Not that he’d be  _ that  _ surprised if they had, but such an aggressive affront was unusual for them. They liked to pretend they always punched second.

It was just about money. That was it. The call was only three minutes and four seconds. That was it. He was fine. It was fine.

He went to bed. He dreamed of black water and mouthfuls of ash. And when he woke up, the suffocating ache in his chest and his throat were mostly gone.

They didn’t call again.

 

 

######

  
  


For Adam, waking up tangled in Ronan’s embrace was one of five best feelings in the world. His forehead pressed into Ronan’s back, legs woven together, a hand on Ronan’s chest to feel every rise and fall: Adam wanted to bottle the feeling to drink every day they were 430 miles apart. 

“Breakfast?” he asked once Ronan deigned to pry his eyes open in the harsh morning light.

“Fuck you.”

“No thanks. But I was serious about breakfast.”

Ronan shoved his face in the pillow with a groan. “No dining hall,” he grumbled.

“No dining hall,” Adam agreed. “There’s a diner nearby. Cheap. Greasy. Decent hash browns.”

“With real hash or not?”

“I respect myself far too much to answer that question.”

“This is critical to my decision.”

“Your terrible jokes are critical to  _ my  _ decision about dumping you.”

Ronan gasped and threw himself onto his back. “I thought dad jokes were the key to your heart! I was certain that was how Gansey got you suck his--”

Adam hit him with his pillow. “I hate you so much.”

Ronan shoved the pillow away. “Good thing I’m cute, huh.”

Adam barked out a laugh. Ronan kicked him off the bed.  

The diner was a few blocks from campus, on the other side of the cemetery. They strolled through campus, bumping shoulders and laughing at pictures of Ronan’s cows and horses. Ronan pointed out a car parked on the street, a Fisker, and started saying something about Henry and his shitty car and his shittier driving when Adam saw it.

A pick-up truck. Toyota. Blue. Old, from the 90s, maybe.

_ No. 1988. Blue 1988 Toyota pick-up. _

It had a Virginia license plate. The plain white and blue one.

_ Blue. 1988. Wheels kicking up dust in the trailer carport. _

He knew that car. Knew who drove that car.

Time stopped.

His heartbeat was suddenly all he could feel. Desperately clawing its way up his throat. Blood pounding in his ears.

_ Toyota pick-up. Expired plates. Pulling up to the driveway. Squeaking brakes. Slamming doors.   _

He couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t feel. Couldn’t hear, couldn’t move, couldn’t stop staring at the blue 1988 Toyota pick-up with Virginia plates sitting against the curb with a balding man in the driver’s seat.

_ Stomping work boots and calloused hands around his shirt collar and accusations and fists and belts and it hurts it hurts it hurts _

The man shut off the ignition. Got out of the car. He was round. Wearing a flannel shirt and workboots.

_ You fuck up my truck, boy? That why my brakes are hollerin? What’ve you been doin workin in that damn garage if you can’t fix a goddamn brake line. _

He couldn’t  _ be  _ here. He  _ couldn’t  _ be here. Not a chance in hell he’d come up this way, and for what? Just to beat him? Just to slap him across his cheek until he stopped crying, or shove him against a wall until he pleaded for him to stop, or kick his ribs until they cracked?

_ Nothin but a worthless piece of shit. You spend all day workin on my truck and it runs like shit? Ain’t no way you’re makin money with such crap work. I raised you better than that, boy! _

Adam tried to breathe. Tried, and tried, and tried again, but all he could smell was stale beer and cigarette smoke, mold and dust and canned store brand soups and cheap Wal-Mart perfume.

_ You think just ‘cause you go to some pussy-fuck school you’re better than your old man? Huh? Think you can’t do hard work no more ‘else you’re ruin your goddamn reputation? Just like all those prissy fucks walkin through town thinkin they better than us. Is that what you think, too?   _

How had he found him? How did he know? Why would he come here, had something happened, no his mother had his number she would have called so then why was he here--

_ You think you’re better than your mama? Better than me? Better than the people who raised you? Who give you food and the clothes on your fucking back and a roof over your ungrateful--Look at me when I’m talkin to you! _

why was his truck here, why was he here, why why why why why--

A round-face boy with shaggy blonde hair and a backwards cap greeted the man as he stepped out of the truck. Same olive-skin, broad shoulders, ski-slope noses.

Robert Parrish had a knob on his nose, just past the bridge. Broken, once, in a drunken fist-fight with a neighbor on New Years Eve.

The boy and the man hugged, the man clapping the other on the back, saying something Adam couldn’t hear but it looked like it sounded nice. Warm. Like “you’re lookin good, son,” or “keepin your grades up this semester?” or “Good to see you; mama’s got your favorite cookin at home.”

“Adam?”

Ronan’s voice cut through the blood in his ears. He was waiting a few feet ahead. Adam knew, somewhere, that he had frozen in place. But that rational part wasn’t talking right now. That part couldn’t be heard over the thud thud thudding of his heart pushing itself out of his tightening chest.

“You okay, man?”

Time snapped back into place. Rustling leaves, brisk autumn air. Had it only been a few seconds?

“Yeah,” Adam exhaled. His hands were shaking. He dragged his gaze away from the truck and back to Ronan. He was staring, had  _ been _ staring, blue eyes darkened with worry and lines creased deep between his brow. “Yeah, I’m fine.”

Ronan didn’t believe him. But Ronan wasn’t one to push.

Adam gave himself three more deep breaths to let his heartbeat steady out again. He clenched his fists and shoved them deep into his pockets, and stepped forward to meet Ronan. Ronan bumped his shoulder gently. Grounding. It helped.

“This place you’re taking me better be fucking amazing,” he said. “Because I could eat a cow and a half right now.”

“If you had to eat one of yours, who would you eat? Venom, Twister, or Doratio?” Adam asked. Ronan probably noticed how his voice trembled and breath halted. He didn’t say anything.

“Definitely Twister. Maybe Derecho. Venom is Matty’s favorite. He’ll go into a mourning period when that cow kicks it, fucking Victorian-level shit I swear. Oh, speaking of, did I tell you how fucking Horse-Horse tried to itch himself on the damn electric fence the other day? Dumbest fucking animal on earth, I swear...”

Ronan took the conversation, ran with it as far as he could, and then took it a few miles further. Kept Adam from falling too far back into the dust, asking him stupid questions, mispronouncing things on the menu on purpose, trying to balance as many Splenda packets on a fork tine as he could.

A waffle made him feel a little better. Enough so that when Ronan asked what the hell happened, he didn’t bristle.

He took a deep breath and looked out the window. The truck was gone. A Prius was in its place. “My mom called.”

The packets fell from the fork.

“When?”

“Few weeks ago.”

“What’d she want?”

“Money.”

Ronan stabbed a sausage link. “How shitty of her.”

Adam closed his eyes, and focused on the heat of the ceramic coffee mug tight in his grip. “Yeah. It was.”

Ronan took the other sausage link and rolled it onto Adam’s plate.

“I watched a documentary the other week about how sausage is made,” Ronan said. “Wanna hear about it?”

Adam opened his eyes to poke the sausage on his plate. “Absolutely not.”

“We can watch it later.”

“Please stop ruining all the things that make me happy.”

Ronan laughed, and that made Adam smile.

He didn’t bring it up again.

 

 

######

  
  


Things felt different after the fires started. After the strange creature ate Hurricane. After the Cascades. 

Shadows flickered at the edge of Adam’s vision. Trees hissed with more intention than just leaves disturbed by the wind. Even his tarot cards felt odd between his fingers, strange and difficult to lay and grasp. The Moon reversed, The Tower upright. Temperance: fear and change and unbalance.

Adam had a hard time telling what was normal for being the Magician, and what should worry him. It had been nearly two years since the gentle whispers of Cabeswater disappeared. Since he sacrificed his constant companion to save Gansey’s life. Sometimes he thought he could still feel it. An amputated limb that still itched and ached. 

Some of that strange feeling might have been thanks to the lovely chat with his mother. His family was a lingering wound that could never quite heal. But he thought he’d buried that ages ago. Deep beneath the ground. Where he didn’t have to see it. Or think about it.

This…  _ feeling,  _ whatever it was, felt like more than that, though. Anxiety settled more often in his stomach, and just beneath the surface of his skin. This sensation ran far deeper. He felt it in his bones.

He’d known what life was like with the demon. That was violent and sticky, like sinking into a tar pit, or putting your hands in a decaying carcass. This was not that. This was odd. This was strange. But so far, didn’t seem worth worrying over.

He didn’t tell Ronan. Why bother, if he didn’t know what it was? Adam could handle this on his own. If there was anything to handle.

What Ronan  _ could  _ handle was distracting Adam. Truly. Whether he was being annoying, or decidedly  _ not  _ annoying, Ronan could worm his way into Adam’s head and pull his attention away in an instant. And Adam was more than happy to let him. The more he pondered what was happening, what  _ had  _ happened, the more the strange feeling itched beneath his skin and  wound tighter in his chest.

They hadn’t done much all day. That’s usually what they did when Ronan visited: stay up late, wake up late, make out a lot, eat cheap takeout Ronan insisted on buying because “fucking chivalry, dumbass.” Maybe they’d see a cheap matinee, or go bowling; they’d even gone ice skating once (which was a disaster of bruises and hurt tailbones and busted egos and they both decided to never skate in public ever again).

But Adam felt itchy again. Unsettled. Like he wanted to  _ do  _ something, anything that might mask the anxiety curdling in his gut and squeezing his chest. He wanted to feel his heart race, hear Ronan shout with glee, taste the thrill of driving 90 down 81 with the windows down and electronica pounding, chasing a thunderstorm as the Blue Ridge smoked and the sun set behind the Appalachians.

They couldn’t drive 90 here. Well,  _ Ronan  _ could, but they’d probably end up dead. Or arrested. Maybe both.

He needed something else. Something loud, and aggressive, and a little bit dangerous but not too much.

Which is why Adam looked up from his desk and asked Ronan, in his best attempt at nonchalance, “Do you want to go to a party?”

Ronan snorted. He lay with his legs up on the wall and head hanging off the edge of the bed, bouncing a tennis ball off the wall. “Is that a trick question?”

“No.”

He caught the ball and rolled onto his side. “Do  _ you  _ want to go to a party?”

Adam shrugged. “I dunno. I just. It’s college, right? That’s something you do in college. Go to parties.”

“Who’s  _ you _ ? Do  _ you  _ go to parties?”

“No. But. I don’t know. Forget it.”

“Parrish, if you want to go to a party we can go to a fucking party.”

Adam sighed. “It was a dumb idea.”

Ronan threw the tennis ball at him. Adam caught it. “It  _ was _ a dumb fucking idea, but I like dumb fucking ideas, so let’s go.”

Adam texted Colton and asked where a good party was on this fine Saturday Night. Within a minute, Colton called him.

“Did you just ask me where there’s a party tonight?” he said.

“Yeah, we’re thinking about going to one,” Adam said.

“You want to go to a party.”

“Yes.”

“ _ You,  _ Adam Parrish, want to go to a party.”

“Yes.”

“A  _ party  _ party.”

Adam rolled his eyes. “ _ Yes.  _ One of those.”

“I mean, it’s cool. You can do whatever you want. It’s just. You’ve never seemed like you wanted to before.”

“I didn’t.”

“But you want to go now. Hey, Ronan isn’t making you, is he?”

“Fuck no,” Ronan shouted.

“Okay. Well, look, the soccer team has a mixer with volleyball and Chi Psi tonight. It’s closed for the first few hours but once it opens you can come. Jules & I will be there. I can send you the address?”

“Thanks.”

“There’s vodka in the bottom drawer of the bin under my bed if you want it.” Watermelon Burnetts, a gag gift from one of their friends. “And maybe some wine left over from last night.”

“Cool. Thanks.” Adam was not going to drink either of those things.

He put the phone on the desk and looked at Ronan. “Guess we’re going to a party,” he said, and tossed the tennis ball back to Ronan.  

“I never in my life thought I’d hear those words coming from your mouth,” Ronan said. He bounced the ball off the desk. “You sure you want to?”

Adam shrugged. “Not much else to do around here that’s free.”

Ronan barked out a laugh. “Good fucking point.”

Adam threw on the cleanest, least-wrinkled flannel he could find in his growing pile of once-worn clothing. At 11, Colton texted him the address. Julie texted him twenty-six exclamation points and a GIF of a cat at a turntable with lasers in the background.

Adam stifled a yawn as he locked his door.

“Wake up, old man,” Ronan said with a smirk. “Fun’s just getting started.”

The party was in some random off-campus house’s basement. Julie met them at the back door, solo cup in hand and talking a little too loud, and flirted them in without a cover charge.

“I’m impressed,” Ronan said as they stepped into the kitchen, bass bumping beneath them and shouts echoing through the house.

Julie squealed. “Does this mean we’re friends?” she said, draping herself on Ronan’s shoulder.

“Fuck no,” he replied and shrugged her off.

Julie pouted. “Colton!” she cried. “Ronan says we’re not friends.”

“Pretty sure he’s only friends with, like, three people?” Colton said, appearing beside Julie and more than willing to let her loop her arm around his shoulders. “I wouldn’t take it personally.”

She glared at Ronan, pointed at her eyes then jabbed her fingers at his. “I  _ will  _ become the fourth friend,” she announced, words only a little slurred.

Just to spite her, Ronan fistbumped with Colton.

“Stop,” Adam said with a smile, nudging Ronan’s ribs. 

“I need another drink,” Julie said.

“Party’s mostly downstairs,” Colton said.

Adam led Ronan down the basement steps. Music pulsed through the crowd, some generic hip-hop song with the bass turned up too loud. They wove through clusters of volleyball players and soccer players and frat boys, some of whom Adam recognized but many he did not, grinding on one another and dancing and shouting as Jungle Juice and Natty Light sloshed over the sides of their solo cups. In one corner, Chi Psi brothers did a keg stand. In another corner, a familiar face played beer pong. Corinne sunk a shot, and high-fived her teammate. Plastic disco balls hung from exposed floor beams next to strips of blacklight.

It was loud. It was messy. It was everything Adam had anticipated a college party to be.

And he really didn’t like it.

He and Ronan managed to worm their way to the a couple metal chairs haphazardly erected near a couch and coffee table overflowing with booze bottles and solo cups. Ronan sat on his right.

“You don’t seem thrilled to be here, man,” Ronan said, taking Adam’s hand to play with his fingers.

“Pot callin the kettle black,” Adam shouted back. He was going to lose his voice by the end of this night, he could already feel it.

Shadows flickered in the corners, moving and twisting with the changing beat of the music.

“I just...what do you even do at shit like this?” Adam asked.

Ronan laughed. “What’s it look like? You drink. You get drunk. I can teach you beer pong, if you want.”

Adam’s brow pinched. “I know how to play beer pong,” he said, offended.

Ronan raised his brows.

“I’m not  _ good  _ at it,” Adam clarified. “But I know what to do. I don’t live under a rock, Lynch.”

“Could’ve fooled me,” Ronan said, and Adam smacked his arm.

“Was this a terrible idea?” he asked, shoulders slumping.

Ronan shrugged. “Not the worst you’ve ever had.”

“What’s the worst?”

“Remember that time you sacrificed yourself to a magic fucking dream forest? That was the worst.”

Shadows shivered at the edges of his vision.

“I was only 17 and was going through some real shit, okay? We all make dumb mistakes,” Adam said.

Ronan raised his hands in mock surrender. “I’m not here to fucking judge. I’m just saying. Worst decision? Probably.”

“I’d argue the worst decision was dating you, but I’m not here to judge,” he mocked.

“Fuck off, shithead.”

“Asshole.”

“Hey, Adam!” Corinne said. She pushed aside a stumbling frat bro and pulled up another metal chair. He platinum hair was pulled back into a high ponytail, eyes winged with black eyeliner and silver hoops along the shell of her ear. “Kinda surprised to see you here. Adam’s boyfriend,” she said with a nod to Ronan. “Where’s the service bird?”

“Guarding the dorm,” Ronan replied coldly. Adam elbowed him.  

“Saw you won beer pong,” Adam said.

“Oh, yeah. Those Chi Psi douchebags jerk themselves off to how  _ amazing  _ they are at beer pong.” She scoffed. “Gotta keep them humble. What brings you out?”

Adam shrugged. “Just...wanted something different.”

“Having fun?”

Ronan snorted. Adam sighed.

“You know what the problem is? You’re both far too sober. Come get a drink.”

Ronan looked at Adam, gaze soft and curious. Giving Adam the lead. Heat burned in Adam’s stomach. He nodded.

“Yeah,” Ronan said.

“Sure,” Adam added.

Corinne smiled. She gestured them with her chin to a makeshift bar made of milk crates, two-by-fours, and serious regret.

“Tequila. 3 shots,” she told the barkeep, some kid who didn’t even look legally allowed to drink yet. 

He grabbed a bottle with the labeled ripped off. “No,” Corinne said. “Top shelf.”

“That’s Caleb’s shit,” the barkeep countered.

“Like he’ll notice,” Corinne scoffed. “And he owes me.”

The kid faltered, but under Corinne’s glare replaced the unmarked Tequila and pulled down a stout glass bottle marred with duct tape screaming “CALEB” at all angles. He pulled out the round stopper and eyeballed double shots into three plastic medicine cups.

Corinne grabbed two between her fingers and held them out for Ronan and Adam. “Cheers.”

They knocked the rims, tapped the cups to the plywood, and drank.

Adam’s throat burned like he was drinking fire, scalding all the way down. His entire body contracted in disgust. Corinne cringed, too, and exhaled through gritted teeth.  

Ronan, however. Ronan looked as if he’d just taken a sip of water.

It was maybe the third hottest thing Adam had ever seen him do. He gulped.

Ronan’s gaze caught his, traced the flush burning in Adam’s ears, and smirked with a knowing glint in his eye. “One more?” Ronan asked.

“Sure. Brian, another round?”

This time, when Ronan knocked back the shot without so much as a shiver, he didn’t break eye contact with Adam. Adam’s mouth went dry. Turning him on at a frat party by drinking a  _ goddamn tequila shot?  _ There’s no way that didn’t break some code of conduct. The Geneva Convention, some declaration from the Department of Defense...something  _ somewhere _ must dictate that was absolutely unfair.

Corinne turned to a shout that might have been her name, and also might have been absolute gibberish. “If you want more later, let me know,” she told them, and walked over to her teammates.

“Think I just found your new kink,” Ronan said into Adam’s ear.

“I fucking hate you,” Adam said, but a hitch in his breath told a  _ very _ different story. He grabbed Ronan’s hand and led him back to their chairs. Colton and Julie had made their way to the couch, Julie sitting on Colton’s lap as he played with the short ends of her curled hair. A water bottle had replaced her solo cup. “Adam!” she cheered. “Ronan, are we friends yet?”

“No.”

“Fuck,” she shouted, then covered her mouth with her eyes wide. “Shit, that was really loud.” She giggled.

“Yes, very,” Adam said.

“You guys should go dance,” Julie said. “We danced and it was great. And, oh, Corinne! Corinne, come dance with me!”

Julie slipped off Colton’s lap and hurried over to her teammates.

“Did she get this drunk last night?” Adam asked, growing increasingly distracted by Ronan’s fingers tracing the knobs of his spine.

“Nah. That party sucked. We went back to her room after an hour,” Colton said. He leaned forward to see Ronan. “You leave tomorrow, right?”

Adam wasn’t sure if it was the tequila, or Ronan’s gentle touch, or the way Ronan’s mouth turned down at the mention of him leaving again; the thought of having to say goodbye again suddenly hurt. A lot.

“Yeah. Gotta get back to the farm,” Ronan said. “Almost pumpkin season.”

Adam laughed.

“What? Pumpkin season is fucking serious.”

Adam couldn’t stop laughing. Was that the tequila, too? Everything felt warm around the edges. Softer. No longer harsh and loud and sweaty and violent.

Maybe this is why people could enjoy parties.

“Colt, come dance!” Julie said, suddenly appearing and grabbing Colton’s hand.

“Adam?”

Adam looked up. Corinne stood before him, hand out in offering. The black ring and silver chain around her neck sparkled. Her sharp gaze met Ronan’s. “Unless you plan on…”

“No. It’s fine,” he grunted. He crossed his arms tight across his chest (which was an absolute  _ shame  _ considering how his black muscle tank hung off his frame-- _ Christ _ , Adam needed a cold shower) and leaned back in the chair in practiced disinterest.

Adam looked at him. “Go,” Ronan said.

So Adam did.

Tequila filled his stomach with a strange, alien warmth, loosening his limbs and fogging the parts of his mind that saw shadows of leaves and branches swaying in his peripheral under technicolor lights.

They moved to the edge of the dancers. Bass vibrated through Adam’s bones. Alcohol blurred the edges of the world. Corinne tooks his hands and helped him move to the beat. Adam was a shitty dancer. Thanks to tequila, he didn’t care.

One song bled into another. Corinne glanced over his shoulder with a crafty sort of smile. She nodded, and suddenly Ronan’s hands were replacing Corinne’s, and she was slipping back to her friends. 

“You’re welcome,” she mouthed over Ronan’s shoulder. Nothing like a little well-placed jealousy to get a handsome, grumpy boyfriend out on the dance floor. Adam needed to remember to thank her. And also, to remember this next time he needed someone manipulated, because apparently she was damn good at it. 

Ronan grabbed his waist and pulled him closer, and Adam's mind went blank. Absolutely, totally blank, until he smelled Ronan's leather jacket and Wolfthorn deodorant. And then it was all Ronan. Ronan's full lips and sharp cheekbones. Ronan's warm hand rucking up the hem of his shirt to lay on his bare skin. Ronan's thigh between his legs, Ronan's hips rolling with the music. Ronan's breath, Ronan's eyes, Ronan's attention, Ronan Ronan  _Ronan._  

The song changed. The beat started. Fast, pounding, familiar. A memory of whispering leaves and color-changing fish, of the gentle wisdom of Aurora, of hooking the watch around Opal’s little wrist, of making Ronan smile and  _ these were not forces to play with,  _ of Cabeswater before it all went to shit.

Adam and Ronan looked at one another and laughed. It was the song from so long ago, the one Cabeswater had played for Adam. For Ronan. Their foreheads met, hips swaying gently together, ignoring the beat in favor of their own rhythm and flow at the edge of the dance floor.

Ronan nosed at Adam’s collar bone, at the hollow of his throat, up along the tendons of his neck as Adam closed his eyes and hooked his fingers in his belt loops to pull his hips in closer. He felt the warmth deep in his bones: hot summer days watching Ronan weed, laying in front of the wood stove during a blizzard, snuggled beneath a blanket on lazy mornings with Ronan’s arms and legs wrapped around him.

Adam nudged Ronan’s head up so he could look into his ice blue eyes. And then he kissed him. Felt Ronan’s fingers wind through his hair, a calloused thumb caress his cheek, worn leather wristbands ghost along his neck. He sank into the feeling of Ronan’s tongue twisting around his, the feeling of Ronan’s hips grinding against his thigh. He ached. He burned. More, more,  _ more.  _

“Get a room!” Julie shouted.

Adam gave her the finger. Ronan kissed him harder.

The song had ended a long time ago, switched to some stupid pop song everyone else seemed to know. “Wanna get out of here?” Adam panted, pulling Ronan’s face away.

“Jesus Fucking Christ, thought you’d never fucking ask,” Ronan growled and he kissed him once more.

Ronan played the song one more time when they got back to Adam’s suite. “Another memory,” he said as Adam pushed him against the door. “Just one more good memory.”

Adam kissed him senseless. And later, Ronan moaned loudly enough that one of his suitemates cheered for him from across the common area.  

Fair was fair, after all.  

 

 

####

  
  


 

Maybe it was the tequila. 

Maybe that’s why Adam dreamed of his hands around Ronan’s throat once more.

He didn’t know what came before, just that by the end he stood at a rest stop and threw a fist at Ronan’s face as a demon hissed in his ear and Cabeswater wailed and screamed in hopeless mourning. It was Adam, hands around Ronan’s throat, soft flesh crushed under angry fingers. It was Ronan, blue eyes desperate, terrified, turning redder and redder and redder as Adam’s hands squeezed tighter and tighter and tighter. A fluttering pulse beneath his fingertips, black unmaking bubbling from Ronan’s nose and eyes and mouth, tornado clouds swirling and red lightning screaming and _hit me punch me do something make me_ _stop_ but then Ronan’s face flickered replaced by someone gaunt and freckled with fair hair and purple green mottled bruise around his eye and Ronan was adam _he was adam_ in a shirt that got splattered in blood on his 16th birthday when his father gave him a nosebleed the world smelled like acid and cooper and decay and burning forests as the clouds sloughed from the sky like the rotted skin of a tomato the fingers crushing adam’s windpipe were no longer his own instead thick and calloused with knuckles cracked and split from punching door jambs and bar tops and young boy’s faces and Adam was crushing adam’s chest with his knee because the Adam who had just been strangling Ronan was now his father he was his father he was his father _he was his father_ cursing and spitting and bellowing over roaring wind and the winding gyre of whirling black smoke as everything screamed and burned and deafened him again and again and again and againandagainagainagain _again--_

Adam snapped awake with a gasp, chest heaving, throat aching, blood rushing in his ear. He ran trembling hands through his hair over and over again, scratching his scalp and feeling the pull of his hair. Tears still ran hot down his cheeks.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw movement. The shadows. Something.  _ Someone.  _ A whiff of burning wood, of acrid smoke.

Adam froze.

It was coming from the dark maw of his cracked open closet. The shadows were moving. Only a little, just a quivering at the edges. But they were moving. He was looking at them, head-on, and still they twitched.

He grasped for flowering vines and gentle leaves that hadn’t whispered to him for two long years. Ached for the thick weight of the forest’s heat in his bones, for it to cradle him and hold him and get him away from the darkness in the closet that curled beneath the door and inched toward the bed--

But nothing came. Nothing was there anymore. It was only Adam. Adam choking Ronan, Robert choking adam, pale flesh and bursting capillaries, screaming and screaming and screaming--

No.  _ No _ . It was a just a dream. The shadows, his father, the strangling; the bruises on Ronan’s neck that lasted for weeks like galaxies printed onto fragile flesh, the taste of rot left in his mouth from the demon--  

It was just a dream. His heart fluttered. It was just a dream. Breathing in short, weary gasps. It was just a dream. Hairs on the back of his neck at stark attention.  _ It was just a dream. _

Adam looked to his side. Ronan was still fast asleep, curled beneath the topsheet and the Barns quilt. His mouth was slack, expression soft as his hand, even in sleep, reached to hold Adam’s.

Adam scrubbed the tears from his eyes and cheeks. He scraped his bitten fingernails down his scalp and neck and arms.

His phone buzzed.

2:55 AM. Two texts from Corinne: y _ ou missed Greg Watson puking all over the pong table _ and then,  _ oh shit, hope that didn’t interrupt sex time _ . A bunch of texts in his suitemates’ group chat about Adam’s very loud sex with his very scary boyfriend.

And most recently, a blank text block. No name. No number. No preview.

He opened it.

It was just letters. Letters and numbers and symbols. Grouped together like they should be words and sentences and a paragraph of  _ something _ but it wasn’t. It was just nonsense. Gibberish. Keyboard smashing.

But Adam knew what it meant. He could feel it. Couldn’t translate it. Knew, objectively, that this was nothing, not even  _ code  _ for something, but he  _ f _ elt it. Felt the meaning of it just like he could read a book and feel a sentence. He  _ knew _ .

Something hissed in his ear. The deaf one. Wood grain crackling, mud bubbling, loose dirt lifted from broken ground.

He dropped the phone. Picked it back up and threw it on the desk. Picked it up again and chucked it across the room onto Colton’s empty bed.

Without leaving the bed, without taking his eyes off the closet and the hissing shadows within, he fumbled for the surge protector, flipped the switch, and turned on the fairy lights.

Everything stopped. No shadows. No whispers. Just clothes haphazardly hung in the closet.

Ronan didn’t stir.

Adam’s heart raced. His hands shook. He couldn’t get enough air into his chest. Focus. He needed to focus. Focus on the soft feel of the sheets, on pulling his hair through his fingers, on the sweat running down his back, on Ronan’s weight beside him. On the sound of a distant siren, on Ronan’s deep and even sleeping breaths, on the creaking frame of J.E. College. On the smell of Ronan’s deodorant, of Julie’s lingering perfume. On the taste of blood in his mouth, from where he must have bit his cheek in his sleep.

Deep breath in. Deep breath out. Again. Again. And again.

It was 3:14 AM. He wasn’t going back to sleep.

He could get something done, at least. Midterms weren’t far off.

Three more breaths, he told himself, and then back to work.

  
  


####

  
  


At sunrise, Ronan woke. He rubbed his eyes and patted the bed where Adam should have been. His brow pinched. “Hey,” he rasped, finding Adam at his desk. “You been up long?” 

“No,” Adam said, swallowing the lie without a second thought. “Not long.”

Ronan groaned. “Come back to bed. Too fucking early for nerd.”

Adam laughed and stifled a yawn. Orange sunrise flooded through the window.

He nestled himself beneath the covers, and Ronan dragged his back to his chest.

“I don’t want to leave,” he mumbled into Adam’s neck.

“I don’t want you to leave,” Adam whispered.

Ronan sat up on his elbow. He traced a knuckle along Adam’s cheek. “You okay?” he asked.

Wounds and shadows. Hissing and spitting.  _ The door the door it comes. _

Adam nodded.

Ronan took his hand and kissed each of his fingers, the top of the hand and inside of the wrist.

“Okay,” Ronan said.

“Okay,” Adam repeated.

They slept.


	4. Chapter 4

Ronan left Sunday morning, with gruff goodbyes and a kiss so long it could only mean “I miss you already.” 

He was supposed to visit again for Fall Break. Only 3 weeks away. Adam preoccupied himself with schoolwork, library shifts, teaching Colton how to fix his old 2001 Jeep Cherokee, and seeing how long he could go without sleep.

Things were different after the party.

Whispers in his deaf ear. Eyes watching him all the way home. Dog snarls and snapping twigs that always seem a bit to close. Hearing his name when no one was there.

The unknown number called once. Sent his phone into an erratic buzzing fit until Adam answered. Nothing but static and snarls and a distant, tinny voice that sounded horrifyingly like his father. He hung up, turned his phone off, took the battery and SD card out, locked the battery in his car and the phone in his desk and kept the SD card in his wallet for two days, telling his friends he’d accidentally dropped it in the toilet (because that was a thing people with unlimited budgets and no care for their possessions did, right?) and that after a few days in the rice he’d put it back together.

No one had texted him in the meantime, which was both a relief and also,  _ did he really have that few friends,  _ and  _ he could have been dead and Ronan would have no fucking clue that asshole _ , until he remembered he texted Ronan from Colton’s phone telling him the fake dropped-in-the-toilet story, and then he felt guilty for assuming Ronan 1) wouldn’t text him eventually without good reason not to, and 2) wouldn’t have some sort of magic inkling if some untimely death happened to befall him.

He didn’t receive any more strange texts after reviving his phone. But his phone calls with Ronan were definitely more staticy than normal. Maybe he’d put it back together wrong. Probably not, though.

This sort of shit was  _ why  _ he had tarot cards. But the cards didn’t say anything new. They kept repeating what they’d already said _ :  _ change, imbalance, fear.  _ Great. _

Ronan was coming for Fall Break. He could try scrying then. But two days before--after a brutal midterm that made every student feel like they were total failures who shouldn’t be even  _ breathing  _ the air of an Ivy let alone taking classes--Ronan texted him:  _ Pumpkin blight. Can’t come. _

Adam understood. He was disappointed. A little angry, too, but he understood.

He didn’t tell Ronan about the whispers, the shadows, any of it. Because Ronan hated phones, and would hate that Adam wanted to have this particular conversation over the phone, and after he was angry about that, he’d be angry that he hadn’t visited Adam to help him because Ronan was selfless and kind and beautiful and  _ fuck  _ Adam wished he didn’t feel so shitty and so alone.

And it wasn’t like Ronan was the most forthcoming individual on the planet; he had no right to be mad at Adam for not mentioning any of the weird shit happening, because when did Ronan ever tell him  _ anything. _

He spent Fall Break working extra shifts at the library, getting a head start on seminar papers, and sleeping with the fairy lights on. The shadows were getting bolder. The nightmares,  stronger. The bags under his eyes grew darker. It was getting harder to sleep. Exhaustion crept and settled in his bones, a constant ache that made it difficult to focus and even harder to sleep.

“You should go to the health center,” Colton suggested one afternoon when Adam fell asleep in the corner of the couch only two hours after waking up from a long nap. “Maybe you have mono.”

He didn’t have mono. But he went anyways, because his scholarship covered health insurance and there was always a chance he had some rare, strange disease that cause auditory hallucinations and constant tiredness instead of being haunted by his father and weird murderous dogs and the gruesome events of their Glendower quest.  

Instead, they told him to sleep more and do a better job of balancing his academics. Except Adam was light years ahead in all of his classes thanks to his nightmare-induced insomnia.

They also suggested counseling. Adam threw that card out in the waiting room.

He wished he still had Cabeswater. For security. For protection. He thought, often, of the day his father had come to St. Agnes. How the vines had held him, how the thorns had saved him, how the leaves didn’t judge when he cried.

He still grabbed for it, sometimes. Reached for branches when he felt like he was drowning, hoping the forest would save its Magician once more. Sometimes he thought he might have felt  _ something  _ reaching back, until it strained too far and withered away. Most of the time, all he found was emptiness. The big, black hole where it had once been.

Life without Cabeswater was--

No. He didn’t like to think about it. Refused to think about it.

Fox Way had told him that he’d been special before Cabeswater, and he was still special without it. If that was true, then losing it didn’t matter. He had no reason to grieve or mourn. He buried the grief deep beneath the ground, some place he’d never have to touch it. Or see it. Or think about it.

He wanted to move on. Wanted to leave it in the past, along with everything else that had happened: the demon, the sacrifice, his parents.

His phone buzzed while he lay in bed Saturday afternoon, the weekend Ronan was supposed to be there but wasn’t. He hoped the text was from Ronan. He always hoped it was from Ronan.

It wasn’t. It wasn’t from anyone.

He deleted it.

Adam was visiting The Barns for Ronan’s birthday. Two weeks after the end of Fall Break. He could deal with this on his own until then; he’d dealt with far worst for much longer.

He tried to nap. All he could see was his father, the demon, glowing eyes in shadowy corners with fangs and black spit and snarling like wolves.

He worked on his seminar paper instead.

Fall Break ended. He went to class. He worked at the library. He finally joined his friends for their weekly Jersey Shore viewings.

He switched his night shifts at the library for day ones whenever he could. He didn’t go outside at night. He studied in the common room where he wouldn’t bother Colton at four in the morning after nightmares of fire, unmaking, and his father’s gnarled fists woke him.  

Only a few more days until Ronan’s birthday. He could make it just a few more days.

  
  


 

 

######

 

 

 

Ronan’s birthday was on a Thursday. And far be it from Adam Parrish to miss out on an opportunity to surprise Ronan Lynch after he’d done the same for him. 

“Did you skip class for me?” Ronan asked, hopping down the porch steps as Adam cut the growling ignition of the Shitbox. Adam could see his smile from across the front lawn of the Barns, glowing in the midday sun.

“I did. Happy birthday.”

“Is this my gift? Seems cheap, even by your standards.”

“Technically, each of my classes costs about two thousand dollars, so this gift is actually worth about 6 grand.”

Ronan whistled. “Big spender.”

“You’re not getting anything else for the next ten years.”

Ronan hooked his fingers into Adam’s belt loops and pulled him closer. “Fine by me,” he said, voice low and gravely, before capturing his lips with a kiss.

“Now this pumpkin blight,” Adam said when they finally parted.

Ronan groaned. “Fucked up my entire fucking crop. C’mon, I’ll show you.”

The farm Ronan had started at the Barns wasn’t enormous or extravagant. It looked more the size of a hobby farm than anything; someone who enjoyed the routine of plowing, sowing, tending, and harvesting, who may want to cook food grown by their own hand. It definitely was not the size of someone who was selling every weekend at a Farmer’s Market.

Still, Ronan was trying. And the pumpkin patch was his first attempt at a larger crop.

Black rot covered the vines. Pumpkin shells sagged, orange skins wrinkled and blotted with grey mold. Large bites were taken from some of them. Fangs had ripped off chunks of flesh, stringy pulp and dried-up seeds scattered across the field. A massacre.

There were no bugs, Adam noticed. No flies or worms or maggots. No crows. No mice or squirrels. Not even tiny teeth marks or burrowed holes. Except for whatever had eaten them first, nothing else had touched the pumpkins.

Adam pushed one over with his toe. It was distorted from rot and half eaten away, but he could see the face carved into it. Dream seeds, he figured. Jack-o-lanterns, straight from the vine.

“Was Hurricane dreamed?” Adam asked suddenly.  

Ronan paused. “Yeah. She was.”

“When?”

“I dunno. July?”

Adam poked the pumpkin once more. It collapsed into mush.

“Were there any flies on her corpse? Any vultures hanging around?”

“Morbid, Parrish,” Ronan said. “But no. I guess not.”

Adam knelt down at a patch of vines, tangled and black. They smelled like rot and fire, and turned to sticky mush in his grip. He grimaced.

A breeze swept across the field. Fallen leaves tumbled through the air and across the pumpkin graveyard. Whispers in Adam’s deaf ear. A pit of dread sank to the bottom of his gut.

His phone buzzed. Another text. Letters and numbers and symbols and anxiety creeping up through his throat. With a swipe of his thumb, it was deleted.

He shivered.

“What’re you thinkin?” Ronan asked.

Adam stood up, crossing his arms against the chill. “I think whatever ate Hurricane did this, too,” he said, swallowing his fear as best he could. “And I think it’s only eating your dreams.”

  
  


 

 

######

  
  


 

 

Whatever this thing was, and whatever weird taste for Ronan’s dreams it had, would have to wait. Adam needed a nap, and then they had a date. 

Blue insisted she see Ronan on his birthday before her flight to Harvard for the weekend. They met her in the parking lot of L & S Diner after her classes at Blue Ridge Community College. She squeezed Ronan as tight as she could.

“Happy birthday, asshole,” she said into his chest.

Ronan rolled his eyes but hugged her back. “Good to see you too, Maggot.”

They sat in a window booth with big plates full of breakfast foods. Blue told them about her environmental science labs and the abstract bowls she made in pottery. 

“Are they supposed to be abstract?” Adam asked, sipping his coffee.

“Is ‘art’ supposed to be anything?”

“That’s a no,” Ronan scoffed. Blue blew a straw wrapper at him.

“And your farm?” Blue said.

Ronan scowled. “Pumpkin blight.”

“What happened?”

“Fucking rotting from the inside out.”

“You’re doing soil testing in your labs, right?” Adam asked, taking the phone from Ronan’s jacket pocket and scrolling through his photo album. “Has anything strange come up? Something that could cause this.”  

He showed her the photo, and her brow furrowed. She took the phone and zoomed in.

“No,” she said with certainty. “Although, the fires have definitely been messing with the ley line.”

Adam and Ronan looked at one another. “What kind of messing?” Adam asked.

“Like, disrupting energies. Interfering with readings. Even Orla’s saying she’s gotten more break-up calls than anything else since the summer.”

“How about any monster sightings?” Ronan asked, leaning forward.

“Monster sightings?” Blue said with a wry look. “What do you think this is: an 80s movie?”

“We saw a monster this summer,” Adam explained. “Black. Static-y. Ate one of Ronan’s cows. I think it might be behind the pumpkins, too.”

Blue’s eyebrows knit together. She tapped her spoon on the laminate tabletop, looking out the window at a group of JMU students gathered there. “Black dogs are known to appear near ley lines. Bigger than normal, glowing eyes. Sound like your monster?”

“No,” Ronan said, at the same time Adam said, “A little.” 

“It  _ did  _ follow the ley line,” Adam clarified.

“But it wasn’t a fucking dog,” Ronan said.

“Maybe they only called it a dog because they didn’t know what it was,” Blue suggested.

Adam shrugged. Ronan chugged his coffee. “Well whatever the fuck it was fucked up my pumpkins.”

“Have the cards said anything?” Blue asked.

Adam swallowed a forkful of waffle. “No,” he replied. Ronan narrowed his gaze. “Nothing helpful, at least.”

“Figures,” Blue muttered. And that was the end of it.

They said their goodbyes, with a reminder from Blue to call tomorrow and to let her know if they figure anything out. “I’ll ask my mom, just to be sure. If I hear any news, I’ll let you know,” she promised.

They hugged her goodbye and settled back in the BMW.

“Wanna go for a ride?” Adam asked.

Ronan’s grin was razor-sharp. He threw the car into gear in reply.

Adam’s hand rested on top of Ronan’s on the gear stick as they drifted up and down hairpin turns of the Blue Ridge Parkway. Dappled sunlight flickered through the windows, casting a halo behind Ronan’s sharp profile. Adam smiled. Ronan caught him staring, and smiled back.

They stopped at an overlook at one of the gentle peaks, just in time for golden hour. The valley stretched out below them, a patchwork quilt of farmland framed by flaming orange maple trees and golden hickories. They leaned against the hood of the BMW, shoulder to shoulder. Ronan played absently with Adam’s fingers.

“Me coming home wasn’t the only gift,” Adam said after a long stretch of silence.

Ronan quirked a brow. Adam untangled his fingers from Ronan’s and moved to the passenger door to take something from the glovebox. He handed Ronan a binder ring of cardstock strips. The top was thick cardboard, painted black with “Coupon Book” written in Adam’s tiny handwriting with silver sharpie. Ronan looked at Adam, a question in his gaze, and Adam nodded to the book. He opened it.

Ronan carefully flipped through the coupons, smile soft and genuine and growing wider with every page. All hand-written, with small drawings along the borders: a rainbow of 20 coupons for “One BMW Make-Out Session anywhere you want” and “4+ hour car ride without complaining about your music” and “date night of your choosing--Parrish pays” and “date night of your choosing--Lynch pays (and Adam doesn’t fight it)” and so many more. Ronan held the deck like he held Adam’s hands--full of reverence and gentleness. He gripped the back of Adam’s neck and kissed him, and it said more than his words ever could.

“Happy birthday, Lynch,” Adam said against his lips, and Ronan’s smile both stopped and restarted Adam’s heart.

“Can I use one of those right now?” Ronan asked when they parted.

Adam smiled. “BMW Make-out?”

“Fuck yes.”

“Good thing that coupon’s good for three uses.”

“Oh,  _ fuck  _ yes.”

They did a little more than simply making out. But neither were complaining.

When the sun finally dipped below the horizon, Ronan drove them home. Adam dozed in the passenger’s seat until the rumblings gravel road to The Barns shook him awake.

They made out in the car once more in the soft yellow light porch light (“Birthday discount,” Adam told him when Ronan presented the coupon once more. “No coupon necessary.”) until Adam insisted he had one more surprise for him that required going inside.

“We’re baking a cake,” Adam announced. “For your birthday.”

With fresh strawberries from Ronan’s garden Adam had thought to freeze at the end of the summer and a recipe Adam had found in Aurora’s box of family recipes, they baked strawberry shortcake together. Ronan smeared a handful of whipped cream across Adam’s face and licked it off with a suggestive wag of his eyebrows. Adam licked batter from his fingers in a way that made Ronan’s pale skin turn bright red, and he held Adam against the counter and kissed him until their mouths tingled. The oven dinged. They kissed a little bit longer. The cake turned a little more brown than it should have.

Adam placed a candle in the shape of a 4 on the cake. “It’s your mental age,” Adam told Ronan. Ronan threw a handful of flour on him.

They sat on the kitchen table, the lights turned off and the flickering candle of the cake between them. “Make a wish,” Adam said.

“Don’t need to,” Ronan said, stroking a thumb along Adam’s cheekbone.

“Is it because you’ve already got everything you want?” Adam said with a wry smile.

“No, it’s because I can pull whatever the hell I want from my dreams. But you’re a close second.”

“Fuck you,” Adam laughed.

Ronan pulled Adam in for a kiss. “I have something for you, too,” he said.

“What?” Adam said, pulling back but still within Ronan’s reach.

“It’s our anniversary.”

“Since when do we celebrate that?”

“Since I made this and wanted a reason to give it to you where you wouldn’t be able to tell me to fuck off.”

Adam gave him a look, but didn’t deny it.

Ronan went into the study and emerged with a dark wooden frame. He flicked on a light and handed it to Adam. Inside, succulents of all sizes and shapes crowded together. Shades of greens and purples, pinks and blues. A few ones sparkled--clearly dreams--but most just felt familiar when he ran his long fingers over their soft leaves. “From Cabeswater II,” he said softly.

“For your dorm,” Ronan said.

Adam put the frame down gently on the table and kissed Ronan so hard they nearly toppled off the table.

They forgot about the cake.

 

 

 

 

####

 

 

 

 

No matter how long they tried to stay awake, no matter how desperately neither wanted the day to end, it had to. Adam fell asleep with Ronan’s legs tangled in his, with a hand tracing patterns along his abdomen and lips pressing wordless affirmations along the curves of his bones. 

He woke up alone.

Ronan wasn’t in the house. Adam made breakfast and coffee for the both of them, and did not acknowledge the flickers of shadows in his peripheral.

He needed to scry, still. And he would. He’d tell Ronan everything. Really. He would. But not today. Not on this day. There were rituals and rites to perform. Besides, today wasn’t about him. It was about them. And it was about Ronan.

He closed his eyes and counted to ten and tried to ignore the itch in his bones and the hissing in his ear.

Breakfast was nearly cold by the time Ronan came in through the kitchen door, slipping off his boots and burying his face in Adam’s shoulder. “How are you?” Adam asked, the answer clear in the dark bags beneath his red-rimmed eyes. Ronan grunted.

“Can you eat?”

Ronan sighed, but nodded. He gave him a plate of eggs and bacon and toast. Ronan ate it all, drank three glasses of water, too.

“Are you ready?” Adam asked once he’d finished.

Ronan didn’t say yes, but didn’t say no, either. So Adam called Gansey.

“Annual check-in that you’re alive,” Adam said when he picked up.

“Yes, still very much alive,” Gansey replied with a laugh.

“Can confirm!” Blue shouted in the background.

Adam put the phone on speaker as they talked. Ronan sat across the room, chewing on his leather bands and only gunting when spoken to directly.

“When will we see you next?” Gansey asked.

“I’m coming for Thanksgiving. Only a few weeks from now.”

“Right. Thanksgiving. Ronan, you too, right?”

Ronan grunted.

“Yes,” Adam translated.

“I can’t wait.”

No one wanted to end the call, but there were still things to be done. “Don’t die today,” Adam said.

“I won’t,” Gansey replied.

“Excelsior.”

“Onward and upward. And Ronan, happy belated birthday.”

“Thanks,” Ronan said, and stormed from the house before Adam could hang up the phone.

He found him waiting at the BMW with a bouquet of flowers in hand. “Let’s get this shit over with,” he growled, turning the car on as Adam approached.

“We don’t--”

“Yes, we fucking do. Get in.”

Adam did.

They drove to the cemetery of the old Lutheran church. Ronan took half of the bouquet, and led the way to a grave marked for Noah Czerny. They stood before the weathered headstone together, until Ronan inhaled and exhaled sharply. Adam squeezed his hand, and walked away. He knew by now what things Ronan preferred to do alone.

When Ronan gestured him over again, he handed Adam a few flowers for Adam to lay on the grave. Adam pulled a tube of craft glitter from his pocket. “Thought he’d like this,” he said, and Ronan gave a watery laugh.

“Fucker would’ve liked that a lot.”

They dumped the glitter onto the grave. Ronan kissed the tips of his fingers, and touched them to the tombstone. “ _ Ar dheas Dé go raibh a anam _ ,” he whispered. He scrubbed his eyes, inhaled and exhaled, and turned to Adam. “Next stop,” he said.

“Next stop,” Adam agreed.

Opal was waiting for them in Cabeswater II with her own collection of flowers and shiny rocks. Golden sunlight filtered through lush green trees. It sighed in welcome.  _ Greywaren, Magician, grata domum. _

It sounded different than the original. Or maybe Adam was just hearing it differently. Like he was under water, the voice muddled and distant. He reached inside himself for the gentle curl of the vines and the familiar smell of petrichor. All he found was emptiness.

His chest ached. Opal grabbed his hand and held it tightly.

Aurora’s memorial was a clearing at Cabeswater II’s heart. A celtic cross tombstone, intricately carved in a design not unlike the twisting knots on Ronan’s back, stood in the middle of a ring of wildflowers, snap dragons, and forget-me-nots. Vines of morning glories crept along the edges of the grave marker. They were dreamed to never disrupt the front of the cross.

Butterflies with crystal wings fluttered around the garden. If they stood in the circle long enough, and didn’t make a sound, they could hear a harp being played. Distant, and fragile. And underneath that, humming. Adam thought it might have been Aurora’s voice, pulled from Ronan’s memory. He never found a good time to ask.

Ronan and Opal placed the flowers at the grave, and Opal laid a turquoise stone on an arm of the cross. The earth sighed beneath them.

Adam stood between Opal and Ronan. Ronan laid his head on Adam’s shoulder, and Adam stroked up and down his spine. Opal chewed on the band of his watch.

Ronan looked at Adam. It was a request. Adam nodded, kissed his cheek, and took Opal by the hand. “Let’s go find some good sticks,” he told her softly. She smiled with all her pointed little teeth, shrieked, and ran off into the forest. Adam followed.

Ronan found them some time later, eyes red and mouth drawn to a frown. Opal handed him a stick. He rubbed a hand through her wild blonde hair.

“Ready?” Adam asked.

Ronan nodded.

He didn’t say a word on the drive home. Didn’t play music, didn’t speed any more than usual, didn’t chew his leather bands. Just, sat. And drove. And when they reached the Barns he got out of the car, shut the door gently, and walked away.

It was dark when he came back. Adam welcomed him to bed, curled his arm around his waist and buried his face in the back of his neck. Neither said a word.

  
  


####

 

Adam was in the middle of the nightmare once more when he felt it. The drop. 

It knocked the breath out of him like a punch to the gut. Like the floor, the ground, the  _ whole damn world  _ fell out from beneath him. He shot up in bed with a gasp. 

He knew the feeling. Knew it from that summer, long ago, when Kavinsky and Ronan dreamed without restraint, convinced their powers and the ley line’s energy were limitless, unstoppable, all-powerful.  

Between gasping breaths, Adam turned to Ronan. The other man twitched in his sleep, on his back, teeth gritted and veins along his temple throbbing. His eyes snapped open. And he froze.

Adam shot out of bed. He grabbed the barbed wire baseball bat by the dresser.

One second. Two. Five. Fifteen. Twenty-seven agonizing seconds.

And then--

Blood. Gore. All over Ronan. All over the bed. Soaking the comforter and sheets and dripping onto the floor.

Adam dropped the bat. “ _ Fuck _ ,” he said. It smelled like copper. Like death. It burned his nose, coated his mouth.  

Ronan unfroze and screamed, harsh, broken, and cracking as if he’d been shouting for days without pause; he scrambled away from the gore, trapped in the blankets, unable to outrun what he was covered in, screaming, and screaming, and screaming.

“Ronan. Jesus. Shit, fuck,  _ shit.  _ Ronan!”

Viscera and blood and black unmaking, pale splinters of bone and silver threads and black feathers in mounds of flesh.

Platinum, Adam realized. Not silver.

Hair, not threads.

Oh.  _ God. _

He’d brought back part of Aurora. The inside part.

Ronan kept screaming.

Adam moved closer to the bed, trying not to look at the thick, oily mess.

“Ronan, you have to come with me,” he said, as gently as he could while his heart pounded in his throat.

The last scream tapered out, cracking at its end and dying in Ronan’s throat. He shook, frozen in place, staring at the gore on the bed, on his shirt, all over his hands.

“Ronan. Please come with me. You’re safe. You’re okay. Just.  _ Please. _ ”

Ronan looked at him. He wasn’t really looking at him.

“Come on. Take my hand, that’s it.  _ Don’t-- _ don’t look at it. Look at me, okay?”

With a hand tight on his forearm, Adam dragged Ronan from the bed and to the bathroom. He heaved him into the bathtub, clothes and all, and threw the taps on in the shower. A shock of cold water snapped Ronan back to reality with a curse. Adam turned the hot water on as high as it could go.

The nightmare swirled down the drain, clothes and skin weeping red and black. Baby feathers slipped past the grate, globs of coagulated unmaking fell to the floor of the tub with a squelch. A grisly watercolor palette.

Ronan held up his hands. Black unmaking ran down his arm. Tributaries of spilled ink like the blue veins beneath his pale skin. He looked at his arm as if it wasn’t his. His gaze caught something, and traced it up to his hand.

A silver hair hung between his fingers.

No, not silver. Platinum.

Ronan gagged. Stumbled from the tub, pushed Adam out of the way, threw open the toilet seat and emptied the contents of his stomach with retch after violent retch.

Adam sank to his knees beside him, rubbed circles on his back, told him over and over “It’s okay, you’re okay, I promise.”

He heaved once more, and fell back against the tub. And then he cried. Loud, painful sobs that ripped open his chest and scraped his throat and felt like dying all over again.

Adam held him as he cried, head against his chest and fistfuls of his shirt in Ronan’s grasp. When Ronan’s grip relaxed, Adam toweled him off as best he could; he helped him strip free of the soaked shirt and sweats, stained and dripping red water onto the checkered tile. By the time he was clothed in whatever laundry Adam could find in the hamper his sobs had subsided. Tears still ran down his hollow cheeks, gathering at his chin to join the puddles of water and death on the floor.

Adam led Ronan from the bathroom to Matthew’s bedroom.

“Do not move from here, okay? Don’t move until I knock,” he said.

Ronan sat on the edge of the bed and nodded.

Adam shut the door.

Even closed, the acrid smell of blood and decay seeped through Ronan’s door. Adam allowed himself 3 deep breaths. He set his jaw and went inside.

 

 

 

 

###

  
  


 

 

A sliver of the moon hung crooked in the sky. Witching hour. When night is darkest and its silence deepest. 

Adam dragged the mattress through the frosting fields to the mud track, sheets and all. He rolled up the woven rug, bundled the clothes, towels, and comforter in the center, and hauled it to the track as well.

He scrubbed the bathtub and the tile floor with bleach until it was sparkling white once more. Checked the drain for any lingering hairs. Bleached away bloody footprints and drip splatter from the hallway and bedroom floors. Went over it all with a flashlight to make sure he hadn’t missed a single hair or feather or speck of gore.

He knocked on Matthew’s door, but didn’t wait for Ronan to open it. There was more to be done.

He took the can of gasoline he’d seen by a tractor in one of the barns. He doused the mattress and rug, threw the can in, too, for good measure, and flicked a match he’d taken from the kitchen junk drawer.

Black smoke faded to black sky. Burning blood and torched flesh and smoldering feathers cut the cold air with acrid smoke; cracking bones and licking flames echoed across the fields.

He watched the bonfire until it collapsed into embers and ash.

When it was done, he walked back to the house. Ronan sat on the porch steps, knees drawn into his chest with the sleeves of Matthew’s Aglionby sweatshirt pulled over his hands. His eyes were rimmed with red, irises a violent shock of ice blue in the dark.

Adam fell beside him, scrubbing his eyes with a sigh.

“It hasn’t happened in months,” Ronan whispered eventually. “I haven’t..I didn’t...not even last year.” He scraped his nails through his hair, scratching over and over and over again. He sucked in a rattling breath, voice crumbling into a sob as he said, “I miss her so fucking much. I miss Mom, and Noah, and Dad and…it all just hurts. It hurts so  _ fucking  _ much and I can’t, I can’t--”

And then he couldn’t speak anymore, knuckles white and gripping his scalp as he curled further and further inward and cried.

Adam couldn’t speak. Even if he could, what could he possibly say? He did what Ronan would do. He wrapped his arm around Ronan’s back and lay his cheek against his shoulder, holding him together as best he could.

Dawn came, cold and bright, and Adam and Ronan were still on the porch. Frost melted into mist when touched by pale sunlight.

“Come inside?” Adam asked.

Ronan nodded.

“Lay down with me?”

Ronan paused. “I won’t--”

“I know.”

Adam slept.

  
  


 

 

#####

 

 

 

Adam woke in Declan’s bed only a few hours later, the space beside him cold and unused. He knew Ronan had laid with him for at least a little bit, knew he’d felt Ronan’s arm around his waist and his shallow, shaking breaths against the back of his neck. But now he was gone.

He was tired. So horribly tired. Felt like he could sleep for a month, and still not be  _ awake. _

He could sleep when he was dead. Right now, he needed to find Ronan.

Pulling himself from the bed was one of the hardest things he’d ever done. The sun was bright and cheery, the trees aflame in autumn hues. It was peak leaf color this weekend, he realized, as he waited for his coffee to brew. Ironic. All he could see in the bright red oak trees was blood.

He took his coffee out on the porch. Ronan sat on the steps, wrapped in a blanket, as if he’d never come back inside. Adam sat beside him, not quite shoulder-to-shoulder but close enough that if Ronan wanted to close the gap, he could.

He didn’t.

Adam sipped his coffee. Steam swirled into sharp peaks, met their cloudy breath halfway and both disappeared into the cold November morning.

Ronan sniffed. Scrubbed his eyes. Curled further into the blanket.

Adam had expected anger. He’d expected tears. He’d expected Ronan’s loud way of dealing with every emotion.

He hadn’t expected this. Ronan, withdrawn. Ronan, silenced.

He took one more sip of his coffee, and handed the hot mug to Ronan. Ronan looked at him with his brow furrowed, but took the mug anyways.

Adam crunched through the gravel lot and popped the trunk of the shitbox. He took the cardboard box from within--much heavier than he remembered it being--and shut the trunk with his elbow. He placed the box in front of Ronan, and opened up the top.

It was china. Stacks of hand painted plates and bowls; gravy dishes, teacups, and saucers, too. Ronan stared at the box for a long time, brow knitting tighter and tighter, until he finally looked at Adam and said, “What the hell is this?”

“Wedding china,” Adam said.

“No shit. Why?”

Adam took a deep breath. “When Colton and I went to Goodwill for Halloween costumes last weekend, we saw a woman at the donation door. She was having a hard time carrying a box of kitchen stuff, so we helped her. She gave us this box and told us that we could have everything in it, as long as we promised to destroy it. Said it was wedding china, that she’d just caught her husband cheating on her with some secretary. Wanted to make sure his shit got given away, and that the most expensive shit got destroyed. So,” he gestured to the box. “I thought that, maybe, I don’t know...that you’d want to break something today. Or something.”

Ronan looked from Adam to the box and back again.

And then he started to laugh. Deep, visceral, the kind that makes stomachs hurt and eyes water and can’t be stopped by anything except laughing until you can’t anymore. Ronan laughed, and laughed, and laughed. And then Adam was laughing, too. And at some point, Ronan stopped laughing and started crying, and Adam came and sat by his side and held his hand while he hiccuped and wiped away fresh tears.

“This is the best gift,” Ronan said, voice trembling, “that anyone has ever gotten me.”

And that made Adam laugh even more.

They carried the box to the dream barn. Adam handed Ronan the first plate. He weighed it in his hands, tossed it up and down a few times, and then with an ugly, primal shout he hurled the dish at the wall of the barn. It shattered into hundreds of pieces, absolutely and totally obliterated. And Ronan laughed.

He threw plate after plate after bowl after plate, some like frisbees and some like he was a baseball pitcher and some with only the intent to destroy. And with every piece of china smashed to dust, Ronan’s smile grew wider and his eyes drier.

Adam threw a couple, too. Tried to see how far back he could stand and still hit the wall. Ronan cheered for him, cries echoing across the fields, as the plates cracked and smashed and shattered.

The scorned woman had given Adam three boxes of dishware. There were no survivors.

They sat panting in the dew-soaked grass in a sea of broken dishware.

“Didn’t think about clean-up,” Adam said, sucking a cut on his thumb where a piece had nicked him. A final act of revenge.

“I’ll deal with it,” Ronan said, voice hoarse but steady once more. He kicked Adam’s ankle: his way of saying thanks. Adam nudged him back: no problem.

Ronan came back inside. He showered and ate, put headphones on and laid down. He still wouldn’t sleep, but that was okay for now.

For now, everything was okay.

Adam’s phone buzzed. Three messages. No number, no preview. Texts full of gibberish.

Everything was okay.

He deleted the messages. Swallowed the taste of ash in his mouth.

Everything was okay. And Adam had no intention of ruining that.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I would say I'm sorry. But I'm not.


	5. Chapter 5

Ronan Lynch knew something was wrong with Adam Parrish. 

They’d been dating two fucking years, had known each other for four, and Ronan was  _ fluent  _ in body language. Adam might be able to fool other people, but Ronan understood the intricacies of expressions and gestures far better than most people on this earth.

So yes. He knew. He just didn’t know  _ why.  _ Why Adam looked more and more like a zombie, why he sounded distant on the phone, why he wasn’t returning his texts with the same fervor he had in the past.

“It’s got nothing to do with you, I promise,” Adam told him a week and half before Thanksgiving, voice thready and obviously exhausted. “School’s been,” he yawned, “a lot recently.”

Ronan didn’t think he was lying. But he’d thought that before, a few months ago, and clearly he’d been wrong.

He wasn’t  _ worried _ . Adam could handle himself. They spent 85% of their time apart, for Christ’s sake: if Ronan didn’t think Adam could deal--and vice versa-- this wouldn’t be working. And Adam had proven time and time again that he could deal with shit on his own, without help; and he would tar, feather, and quarter anyone who dare suggest otherwise.

Which, the longer Ronan thought about it, probably wasn’t a good thing. Historical evidence suggested that Adam’s way of dealing with things on his own often resulted in suffering, pain, and working himself into the ground.

Okay. So. Maybe Ronan was worried. Fucking sue him.

How the fuck had Corinne known in  _ September  _ that something was wrong?

Irrelevant. What mattered was that Adam was hiding something. He’d told Ronan that his mom had called. But maybe it hadn’t been just that once. Maybe she’d kept calling. Maybe she’d found his address and had sent him a letter. Maybe his father had paid him a visit. Robert Parrish had found him before, when he lived in St. Agnes. Ronan had never told Adam that he’d heard their conversation; he was still in the church scrubbing his-but-not-his blood from the aisle when Mr. Parrish had the fucking audacity to knock on the apartment door and threaten his fucking emancipated son with  _ retribution  _ should he take his sorry fucking ass to court.

That was also how Ronan found out when the trial was. Go figure.

Not the point. The point was that history showed Robert Parrish  _ could  _ and  _ would  _ approach Adam at his residence. And that made Ronan want to t-bone that stupid fucking Toyota pick-up with a semi covered in metal spikes,  _ Mad Max  _ style.

Ronan had intended to ask Adam what the fuck was wrong with him after his birthday, their anniversary, the memorials, et cetera. But then he’d pulled his dead mom’s corpse out of his fucking head, so there went  _ that  _ plan. And this wasn’t a conversation Ronan wanted to have over his god-forsaken cell phone. It would have to wait until they were face-to-face again.

Ronan and Adam planned to spend Thanksgiving with Gansey, Blue, and Henry at the Ganseys’ bougie townhome in Boston that Mr. & Mrs. Dick II bought the moment their precious son signed his acceptance to Harvard. Because  _ of fucking course  _ they did. Gansey swore it was simply for their occasional visit or networking event, and that they’d “discussed owning a rental property in Boston for  _ years _ , Lynch, it’s not just for me, besides I’m living in the dorms my first year. And Harvard’s in  _ Cambridge  _ not Boston,” but for fuck’s  _ sake  _ they’re practically the same places, and for a man who didn’t believe in coincidences, he sure let a lot of shit slide.

But whatever. There was an empty house with plenty of bedrooms and a full kitchen just  _ waiting  _ for Gansey in Boston, which seemed like a far better choice for hosting Thanksgiving than a tiny two-bed dorm with only a half-functioning microwave and a communal hotplate. Also, bigger house meant more privacy for Ronan to pull Adam aside and ask what the hell was wrong with him without everyone and their mother knowing about it.

Also made it easier for Ronan to get away with not sleeping. Ever since the deathiversary, nightmares were a constant companion. Nothing ever manifested, and they weren’t any different from the kind he usually had; he honestly couldn’t remember most of them, not even right after bursting awaking. It was the anxiety that lingered. The sense of dread. That awful feeling that another shoe was going to drop and obliterate everything good and pure in the world when it did.

Sleeping was once again an optional activity. But Ronan was used to running on limited sleep. Adam Parrish was not. And Adam Parrish did not have reoccuring nightmares, nor did he manifest killer birds and bee swarms from his dreams, so in Ronan’s Professional Opinion he had  _ no  _ reason to not be sleeping.

Yale didn’t officially close until 5pm on Wednesday, and God Fucking Forbid Adam leave university grounds before school is out-of-session, so the plan was to leave for Harvard Wednesday evening.

But they hadn’t established when  _ Ronan  _ was going to come to get him, which meant Ronan drove up on Tuesday with the intent to force Adam to eat, sleep, and tell him what the hell was going on.

Thirty minutes before closing two days before Thanksgiving, Ronan stomped into Sterling Memorial Library with Chainsaw perched on his shoulder once again.

“Ronan!” Corinne called, proclamation echoing through the empty lobby.

Ronan gave her something halfway between a growl and a sneer.

“Delightful, as always,” Corinne replied with a smile that was sickening sweet and 67% artificial. She pointed to Chainsaw. “Where’s her vest?”

Ronan dug a folded piece of paper out of his pocket, and tossed it at Corinne. It was a blank sheet of printer paper, save for one line left-aligned along the top:  _ Chainsaw helps. Also fuck off. _

Corinne held it up. “Really?” she said dryly.

“Where’s Parrish?” Ronan asked.

“Shelving. You here to surprise him again?” 

“No.”

“Marital problems?” Corinne smirked.

“Fuck off.” But then Ronan bit his cheek, sighed, and leaned in close. “Parrish. Has he…?”

Corinne frowned. “Been fucking weird?”

Ronan shrugged.

“I don’t think he’s sleeping,” Corinne said softly. No snark, no performance.

“I don’t think so, either,” Ronan said. No spikes, no sneering.

An understanding passed between them.

“And I don’t think it’s just school. Kid’s got a killer courseload, but it’s not any different than last year.”

Ronan’s stomach curdled. “Any idea what else it could be?”

“He’s not cheating on you, if that’s your worry.”

Ronan snorted. “It’s not. I’m a fucking catch.”

Corinne rolled her eyes, but then drew her expression back to serious. “Colton thought he had mono. But the tests apparently came back clean. But he’s tired, constantly, and I don’t think it’s just from sleep deprivation. And he switched his library shifts to daytime ones. And he keeps getting this  _ look.  _ Like, like he’s--”

“--hearing something that you can’t,” Ronan said.

Corinne snapped her fingers. “Exactly.”

Chainsaw cawed. They turned. A student stood at the desk, looking between Corinne and Ronan with increasing trepidation.

“Hey, uh,” he swallowed audibly. “Something’s up with the lights in the bio stacks?”

“Okay,” Corinne said, stone-cold face snapped back into place.

“They’re, like, flickering.”

“Cool, thanks.”

The boy stood awkwardly for a moment. “Aren’t you gonna, like, call someone about it?”

Corinne stared at him. When he didn’t move, she held his gaze while she reached for the phone, shoved it between her ear and her shoulder, and started flicking through a binder of names and numbers. She even dialed, and didn’t break eye contact once.    

The boy shuffled from foot to foot. “Uh. Thanks,” he swallowed, and hurried through the turnstile.

Corinne hung up the phone once he’d left the building. “I swear, it’s like these kids think I’m a fucking...handywoman or whatever for this place,” she grumbled. “Probably just, like, one stupid light over one stupid table that he has some unhealthy attachment to--”

Corinne’s voice caught in her throat. Her eyes grew wide. She grabbed the black ring on her necklace.

The lights flickered. The temperature dropped. The building moaned and creaked, and Ronan felt it, then. Like falling from a too-far height. His stomach dropped. His lungs seized. He grabbed the edge of the desk to steady himself.

Adam’s phone was on the desk. It started buzzing. And buzzing. And buzzing. Corinne grabbed it.

“Unlock it?” she asked Ronan. Ronan did.

Text after text after text, all numbers and letters and symbols strung together in clumps and forming shapes, a constant never-ending stream.

“What the fuck,” he hissed.

This was going to wreck Parrish’s phone bill.

“Take the battery out,” he demanded. Corinne did. But the messages kept coming. The lights kept flickering.

Corinne’s eyes suddenly went wide, and she dropped the phone and the battery on the desk. “That kid. He said bio stacks, right?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s the third floor. Adam’s on the third floor.”

One second. Two.

Corinne threw her ID card at Ronan, already hopping over the front desk. Chainsaw jumped off his shoulder and landed on the desk. Ronan swiped through, jumped the turnstile anyways, and followed her to the stairs.

They ran, two steps at a time, hearts racing. A student tried to press themselves flat against the wall as Ronan barreled past with little more than a grunt.

“Uh, the lights--” they said as Corinne followed behind.

“Yep. Got it. Thank you,” Corinne shouted without looking back.

Ronan didn’t wait for Corinne. He threw open the third floor door before she could reach the top of the stairs.

The lights were strobing. Erratic, buzzing with discharged static and fluorescents. It smelled like the ruined pumpkins, like the dead cow, like the monster from all those months ago. Like rot, like fire.

“No smoke,” Corinne noted, which meant she could smell it, too.

They split up. Ronan wove through the stacks, heart pounding, hands shaking. The darkness here felt different. Thicker. Like he could touch it. He didn’t want to touch it.

“Parrish?” he called. “Yo, Parrish, you up here?”

Across the room, Corinne said, “Adam.” Like she’d found him.

And then she said. “ _ Adam?”  _ Like she’d found something horrible, too.

The lights flickered faster.

“Ronan?” she shouted.

Ronan was already running. Skidding around the sharp corners of the stacks, boots pounding the close-cropped carpet. In the flashing light, he nearly ran into Corinne where she’d stopped in the middle of a stack. And thank God for that.

“Holy motherfucking shitballs,” Ronan whispered.

When they’d explored Dittley's cave, the summer before everything happened, Ronan had experienced Total Cave Darkness. What it meant to be somewhere devoid of light such that he couldn’t see even his hand in front of his face. Absolute, almighty, oppressive, and suffocating, like being crushed from all sides. He never wanted to feel it again.

Facing the shadows before them, he felt it once more. Consuming, surrounding, definite darkness.

He couldn’t speak. Couldn’t think. And it wasn’t until the darkness growled that Ronan realized it wasn’t darkness at all. It was a monster. Like the creature they’d seen during the summer, but larger, manifesting from the shadows themselves, disappearing and reappearing with every flick of the lights. Body bulbous and contorted, legs long with claws like a spider’s, edges blurred as if it were a glitching, pixelated photograph.  

“What the hell is that,” Corinne asked, voice slow and soft and trembling.  

“I have no idea.”

But Adam. Where was Adam?

He cowered in the corner at the foot of the beast, a pile of books and the overturned cart in front of him, blue eyes wide with a sheen of sweat along his brow. He looked ill, feverish maybe. His hands were shaking as he tried, desperately, to make himself smaller.

The creature growled, like grinding stone and crackling flames. Unmaking dripped from its arms and fangs. Black vines tangled at its feet and grew from its limbs, pockmarked with red thorns and jagged leaves. It stank of death, of smoke, and of cheap beer.

“It looks like Adam,” Corinne said, breathless.

It didn’t look like Adam, but Ronan could see how someone might think that, in the way that children often do look like their parents.

Ronan couldn’t quite explain it, couldn’t pinpoint the exact way in which this monster looked like Robert Parrish. But it did. It looked like Adam’s father.

“We need to get him the fuck out of here,” Ronan hissed through gritted teeth.

“Already thinking,” Corinne said.

The monster’s lip curled over jagged teeth, tongues-- _ multiple,  _ Jesus Fucking Christ--flicking out like snakes.

“ _ Sono finis,”  _ Ronan said, because when it doubt, Latin tended to work. But nothing happened. The monster didn’t even twitch in his direction. All of its attention was on Adam. Adam, who grew paler by the second. Adam, with a tear running down his cheek. Adam, who Ronan had seen face his asshole of a dad and multi-eyed nighthorrors and literal fucking demons, and never look so afraid.

“Get Adam’s attention,” Corinne said, ripping the ring and chain from her neck. Something shifted in the air.

“Adam,” Ronan bellowed over the hissing and crackling and buzzing.

Adam’s attention snapped to Ronan, breath visibly catching at the site of him.

The monster reared back, ready to strike.

Corinne ran. She grabbed Adam’s hand and shoved the ring onto it. The shadow lunged. Corinne yanked Adam’s arm. Ronan cried out. Shadows slammed into the bookshelf with an explosive roar of crashing waves and fallen trees and thunderbolts. It splattered above them, yet Adam had been shielded. Not even the dripping debris touched him as Corinne dragged him toward Ronan.

He collapsed in Ronan’s arms, breath ragged and heaving. “Adam, Jesus Fuck, what the  _ fuck _ ,” Ronan snarled.

A sizzling, electric hiss. The hairs on the back of his stood up. It was reforming.

“Yell later,” Corinne snapped. “Run now.”

They ran.

Down aisle, weaving through stacks, dark shadowy vines and jagged leaves and the stench of rot and smoke right on their heels. Fewer lights were flickering, now. One by one, the fluorescents popped, plunging more and more of the library into darkness.

They reached a wall. Darkness behind them. Darkness in front of them. Trapped.

“The fuck do we do now?” Ronan hissed.

Pop.

“I’m thinking,” Corinne snapped.

Pop.

“We don’t have time for you to fucking think!”

Pop.  

“The line--” Adam choked out. “Get me off the line.”

“The hell are you talking about?” Ronan said.

Understanding dawned. “The ley line,” Corinne said. “It’s drawing power from the ley line.”

“How the fuck--?”

“The school,” Adam rasped. His face was flushed, body far too warm, leaning most of his weight on Ronan. Ronan rubbed a shaking hand up and down his back.

“The line runs right under us,” Corinne said.

“ _ What,”  _ Ronan shouted.

Pop.

“Get Adam off the line, and this--whatever it is--can’t sustain itself,” Corinne said.

Action now, Ronan realized. Interrogate later.

“My car’s out front,” he said.

Pop.

Two lights left. The stack plunged into shadow. Spider legs latched onto the shelves. A rumble like an earthquake. Corinne reached up the wall, hand blindly searching--

She pulled the fire alarm. Sirens wailed and white lights flashed through the darkness. A path to the stairwell, right in front of them.

“Go,” she commanded. “I’ll handle this.”

Corinne took the ring from Adam’s hand. She bit the base of her ring finger to draw blood.

“But--” Adam coughed.

“I  _ said _ I’ll handle it! Now go!”

She slid the ring on, covering the well of blood.

The frequency changed. The shadows turned fuzzy. A high keening rippled through the growls and sirens.

Corinne glowed. Nothing big or flashy, but where those shadows were an absence of light, Corinne appeared to be full of it.

Ronan suddenly understood everything and nothing.

Adam wheezed, and Ronan helped him to his feet. Together, with Adam’s arm around Ronan’s shoulder, they stumbled down the stacks to the door, down the stairs, through the lobby, and out the main doors. Eyes following. Vines chasing. Chainsaw took off into the night.

They wove through the crowd of students who evacuated from the building at the sound of the alarms. Street lamps and archway lanterns shuddered on and off, more darkness than light. Shadows nipping at their heels, no longer contained in the terrifying blackness of the third floor of Sterling.

The BMW was parked, illegally, at the curb. Ronan helped Adam into the passenger’s seat, slid across the hood of the car, and threw himself into the driver’s seat. Ignition: on. Clutch: pressed. Heart: pounding. He swung the car out of its spot. 

West. They needed to go west. Ronan raced down narrow streets, avoiding red lights as best he could, running them when he couldn’t, trying to get them out of the city. Adam’s eyes were squeezed shut, his face pallid and pained. He struggled through every labored breath.

“Almost,” Ronan promised him, reaching for his hand. “Almost out.”

He had no idea if that were true. Had no idea how far they needed to go for whatever the hell was happening to stop. But he wouldn’t stop driving until Adam was okay.

Adam took his offered hand, clenched it with all his strength, fingers ice cold and trembling as he bit back moans of pain or sickness--maybe both--and with every whimper he let slip past his tongue Ronan’s heart raced a little bit faster.

Ronan took the exit for the first route west he found, 243, to 8, to 343. Hell, he’d drive them to fucking New York, to Canada, to the goddamn arctic circle if that’s what it took to calm Adam’s fluttering pulse and break his fever and bring color back to his face and help him breath deep, steady breaths--

They went over a pothole. At least, that’s what it felt like. A sharp drop and bump, and then Adam gasped. His chest heaved, like a swimmer resurfacing. The connection had been broken. They were safe.

Ronan turned onto the first road they saw. Pulled over into a harvested corn field, drove to the middle of it, and shut off the car.

Both of them took deep, long, heaving breaths. And now that Adam was safe, now that they were okay, anger bubbled in Ronan’s stomach and up through his chest.

“How long,” Ronan asked, voice low and dangerous, his hands white-knuckling the wheel. “And please, God, do not lie to me.”

Adam struggled to regain control of his breathing. He kept his eyes on the dashboard. “Since September,” he said miserably.  

Ronan’s grip tightened. He ground his teeth. “Why the  _ fuck _ didn’t you tell me.”

Adam didn’t respond.

Ronan cursed. He slammed his fist into the wheel a few times. Threw off the seatbelt and kicked open the door and stomped into the field, never-ending stream of curses trailing behind him.

“‘Since fucking September’, are you shitting me!” he bellowed. “Three months and you didn’t tell me about that goddamn thing?”

“The thing didn’t exist, at first,” Adam replied. He stepped out of the car, following after Ronan, shaking hands clenched into fists. “Weird shit just started and I thought I could figure it out.”

Ronan barked  _ Ha!  _ into the sky, a crazed, fatalistic laugh as he threw his hands in the air. “Weird shit! Weird shit, and you didn’t think to tell me about it!” 

“Because I  _ though _ t I could  _ deal _ with it,” Adam said, teeth gritted, anger growing.

“That  _ thing  _ could have killed you!” Ronan shouted, storming back and forth across the field.  

“You think I knew this would happen?” Adam spit back. “You think I just--hid it from you because I thought it’d be funny?”

“You should have told me!”

“I was  _ going _ to. But then you pulled Aurora’s fucking corpse out of your dreams.”

“The hell does that have to do with anything?”

Adam looked at him like he was speaking a different language. “Because you  _ pulled your mom’s dead body out of a dream,  _ Ronan! What, exactly, would telling you have done after that, huh? Stress you out more? Cause you to sleep less and worry more and pull more dead bodies out of your head? No. I’m not going to let my shit make your self-destruction easier.”

“Do  _ not  _ turn this back around on me, Parrish. I’m not the one who just pulled a goddamn demon that looked like my  _ fucking dad _ into the real world by sheer force of fucking  _ trauma _ . That was  _ you _ .”

“Don’t be an asshole right now.”

“You let a  _ demon loose in your fucking library.  _ I’m not the one being an asshole, dumbass!”

“Because I didn’t want to offload my shit onto you? That makes me an asshole?”

“You. Could. Have.  _ Died.  _ What the hell is  _ wrong  _ with you?”

“You shouldn’t have to deal with my fucking shit!” Adam yelled back

“Yes I should! That’s the whole goddamn point of  _ this,  _ of  _ us _ !” Ronan gestured wildly back and forth between them. “So you don’t have to deal with shit alone! When people fucking care about you, this is what they do!”

“Your mom was  _ mauled  _ and you  _ found her body, _ ” Adam shouted, and  _ that  _ got Ronan to stop pacing. “You watched your best fucking friend--the friend who saved you life  _ how  _ many times?--die in front of you. You were almost destroyed  _ from the inside  _ by a demon.  _ I tried to kill you. _ ” 

Adam took a deep breath, chest heaving and voice dangerously close to cracking. “You went through all that fucking shit and, and--and what? I lose my shit because my  _ mom  _ calls me? Because I can’t even deal with that, with the shit happened two years ago, shit that I caused by sacrificing myself and leaving myself open for being fucking possessed? Because I lost a stupid  _ forest  _ and the only thing that made me  _ special  _ and you almost lost your  _ entire fucking family. _ ”

Ronan stared at Adam. And then he grabbed his head and screamed into the sky, feeling the anger rattle his lungs and scrape its claws down his throat as he threw it from his chest across the field. “This isn’t a goddamn competition you fucking-- _ God _ , you goddamn fucking asshole!”

Adam dragged his hands through his hair, over and over and over again, scratching his nails just above the shell of his deaf ear. “This happened, this  _ all  _ happened, everything from two years ago and right now, it’s happening because of  _ me.  _ Because  _ I  _ opened myself to the ley line, because  _ I  _ made that stupid fucking choice.”

“ _ What? _ No. No, that’s not fucking true. None of what you just said is--”

“ _ Yes.  _ It is,” and the more Adam spoke it aloud, the more he came to realize it was true. “ _ I  _ started the chain of events that woke the Third Sleeper.  _ I  _ was supposed to protect Cabeswater and didn’t.  _ I  _ didn’t figure out soon enough that Persephone was lost in the mirrors,  _ I  _ led the demon right to us,  _ I _ let it get control,  _ I _ hurt you. It was me. And now I’ve made this fucking nightmare thing, because whatever this is found a way in through me.”

_ The door the door it comes it comes. _

He was the door. He’d let it in. Not intentionally, not this time. But it had found an opening in him when he fell into the water. It had been enough to plant the seed. And it fed off him. Off his fears. His energy. His loss.

He shrugged, defeated. “You shouldn’t have to deal with something that’s my fault,” he said, voice breaking over the truth in the words. 

He stood with his hands shoved into his pockets trembling against the wind, face drawn from exhaustion and self-hatred and cheeks still flushed red, eyes drawn to the dead, brown stalks covering the ground.

All the anger inside of Ronan sputtered out at once, extinguished with a final, heavy sigh. He crunched through the field to hold Adam’s haggard face in gentle hands. Adam didn’t flinch away. The fight was over. They were still okay.

“I love you,” Ronan said, “but I do  _ not _ fucking like you right now.”

“Fair enough,” Adam said with a huff that was almost a laugh.

“Do you know what I would do if something happened to you?” Ronan said, voice cracking and jaw trembling. “Do you even fucking understand what that would do to me?”

Adam closed his eyes and leaned into his hands. “Probably the same thing losing you would do to me,” Adam said. He bit the inside of his cheek to keep his lip from trembling.

Ronan held his face a moment more, memorizing every line and every freckle; tracing his jawline, the dark circles under his eyes, the hollow of his cheeks. And then he wrapped his arms around his shoulders and held him as tight as he could to keep his shivering body still. Adam wrapped his arms around his back, face buried in his shoulder, breath shaky against Ronan’s skin. It was a reminder, a chastisement, a command, a comfort, all at once:  _ we don’t do life alone anymore. It’s no one’s fault. We bear the burdens together, always, forever. _

They held each other for a long time. Eventually, Adam’s grip weakened and Ronan kissed his forehead to find it still far too warm. Adam pulled away, bleary-eyed and clutching Ronan’s arm for support.

“We’re going to Harvard,” Ronan announced. “Right fucking now.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Did you know that Yale doesn't provide floorplans or maps of their libraries on their website? Or anywhere? Like, _how_ do they expect me to accurately choreograph a monster chase if I don't know the layout of the stacks? So inconsiderate


	6. Chapter 6

There were three things guaranteed to excite Richard Campbell Gansey III in equal amounts:

  1. A map to the Holy Grail
  2. Lynch Family Secret Recipe Shepherd's Pie
  3. Opening the front door of his Boston townhouse to find Ronan bearing most of Adam’s weight and announcing, “we’ve got a fucking problem.”



Gansey looked wide-eyed from Adam’s blanched face and trembling legs, to Ronan’s venomous gaze. He gripped the door a little tighter, and gasped, “Oh my.”

“Who is it?” Henry called from the kitchen.

“Lynch and Parrish.”

“Kerah!” Chainsaw hollered. She fluttered past to perch on the banister.

“And Chainsaw, apparently.” He gestured them into the house and quickly locked the door behind them. “Jesus Christ. What the hell happened?”

“Did you misread your calendar?” Henry appeared in the kitchen doorway at the end of the foyer. “You’re a day early--” He nearly dropped his mug of hot chocolate at the sight of them. “Oh.”

“Yep,” Ronan replied.

“Chair, please,” Adam rasped. Ronan helped him lay on the couch.

“What happened?” Gansey repeated.

Adam’s eyes fluttered shut. “Demon. Monster. Or something,” he said.

“Or something,” Gansey said.

Ronan leaned against the couch and crossed his arms. “Giant shadowy asshole wrecked the Yale library.”

“How distasteful,” Henry said, handing Ronan one of two beers between his fingers--apparently this called for something a little stronger than hot chocolate--and Adam a glass of water.

“Jesus Christ,” Gansey said again. “Are you hurt?”

“Not exactly,” Adam croaked.

“What does that mean?” Henry said.

“No apparent scrapes or bruises,” Gansey noted. “A mental attack?”

Ronan drank half the bottle in one long pull. “We think it came out of Parrish’s head.”

Gansey worried his bottom lip. “Interesting.”

It sounded like he was sympathetic. But Ronan had known Gansey a long-ass time, and he wasn’t fooled. Gansey _was_ sympathetic, but he was also thrilled, and trying hard not to show it. Adam was hurting, sure, but that just meant a new problem to solve, a new adventure to be had.

Ronan sighed and rolled his eyes. “We have no idea what or why or _how_ the fuck it happened,” he admitted, and Gansey’s excited became palpable. He smiled brightly at the two of them.

“Not to worry. We’ll figure this out. For now, I’m glad you’re safe.”

Adam smiled weakly. Ronan downed the rest of the beer.

Given the circumstances of their departure, Adam didn’t have time to pack an overnight bag. So he borrowed gym shorts and a t-shirt from Gansey, used Ronan’s toothbrush, and tumbled into one of five empty beds in the house. He was asleep within a minute. And he slept through the morning and well into the afternoon, only waking when Ronan insisted he drink some goddamn water for Christ’s sake; he did not survive a fucking monster attack to die of dehydration in this bougie fucking townhome.

All things considered, Gansey and Henry actually handled the news reasonably well. Blue, on the other hand…

Blue flew into Boston in the afternoon. And when Gansey brought her back to the house in the evening, she dropped her bags at the door, stormed up the stairs, and burst into the bedroom.

“What the _fuck,_ ” she shouted.

Adam, still lying in bed, winced and rubbed his temples.

“Who the hell let you into our room, Maggot?” Ronan snarled from where he sat beside him. She sneered in response, then pointed a finger at Adam.

“You let a _demon_ loose in your _library!_ ? Are you _kidding_ me,” she said, punctuating each word with a hand clap. Adam’s eyes squeezed shut.

“Blue, calm the fuck down,” Ronan hissed.

“Oh, I’m sorry, am I not allowed to be _pissed_ that my friend just endangered his _soul_ ? _Pardon me_ for breaking that unspoken rules of _bro code_ that I _clearly_ wasn’t let in on--”

“ _This has nothing to do with that at all--”_

 _"He put a demon in the library!_ Since _when_ do we coddle people who release _demons--”_

“Stop,” Adam shouted. His voice cracked. He dug his nails into his head, gritting his teeth in obvious pain.

Blue clamped her mouth shut. “Oh,” she whispered.

Ronan scoffed. “Yeah, _oh._ ”

“Migraine,” Adam grunted. “You can give me shit, but do it quietly.”

Blue deflated, puffed chest and rigid shoulders falling once more. “Sorry,” she said softly, collapsing onto the side of the bed. “I didn’t mean to.”

“I didn’t mean to destroy Sterling. But shit happens.”

They shared a smile. Blue rubbed his shoulders, paused, and then held the back of her hand against his cheek. “You’re hot,” she said, brow furrowed. “One sec.” She hopped off the bed, returning from the bathroom next door with a thermometer in her hand. She shoved it under his tongue. “100.1,” she announced when it beeped. “Not awful. Not great.”

Adam shivered. Ronan brushed strands of fair hair from his glistening forehead, and pressed a kiss along his hairline.

“Gross,” Blue said.

“Oh, wait, Sargent, I have something for you,” Ronan said, reaching his hand into the back pocket of his pants and pulling out his middle finger.

Blue rolled her eyes, uncapped her middle finger, applied it to her wine-purple lips like lipstick, and put the cap back on.

“Blue wins,” Adam croaked.

“Fuck that,” Ronan snapped while Blue victoriously shouted _ha!_

“When did the fever start?” she asked, soft and serious once more.

Adam shrugged one shoulder. “Don’t know. Reckon it was whenever the shadows appear.”

Blue’s eyes narrowed. “Are you tired?”

“Very.”

“All the time?”

“Yeah.”

“Hearing things?”

Adam nodded shamefully. Ronan squeezed his hand.

Blue bit her cuticles. “I think I need to call Maura,” she said. She marched out of the bedroom, calling for Gansey and demanding his phone.

By the time Blue heckled Orla off the phone and got Maura on the line, Adam staggered downstairs in a pair of Ronan’s joggers and his hoodie. He sat tucked into Ronan’s side on the couch, breath shallow and shivering now and again from fever chills. Ronan lazily combed his fingers through his hair.

“Lasagna’s cooking,” Henry said, joining them in the living room with a mug of mulled wine.

Blue threw herself on the couch next to Adam, pulling his legs into her lap with one hand and holding a bottle of cider in the other. Gansey settled into the armchair with a crystal glass of red wine.

It was like old times, a court before its king, waiting patiently for their leader to bring the council  to order. Gansey adjusted his glasses, turned his watch around his wrist, and then took a deep breath.

“What do we know thus far?”

“Parrish put a monster in the Yale library,” Henry said.

“It’s been following me,” Adam croaked.

“It’s fucking with Adam. Physically,” Ronan said.

“It’s trying to take energy from him, still,” Blue added. “That shadow thing, the ley line--whatever it is, it’s draining him.”

“But we got him off the ley line,” Ronan said. “That was the whole fucking point of coming out here.”

“Moving him only did so much. You stopped it from manifesting, but didn’t stop it entirely. Mom thinks there might be a door open still, something in Adam that’s letting it in no matter where he is. _Not intentionally,_ ” she said quickly as Ronan’s hackles raised and Adam’s gaze narrowed. “You didn’t necessarily need to _do_ anything for it to use you. Whatever it is probably just,” she gestured vaguely, “found an opening and went for it.”

“Use any ouija boards recently, Parrish?” Henry asked. “Collect call to spirits in another realm?”

“No.”

“What could have caused an opening?” Gansey asked, ankle crossed over his knee and swirling his glass of red wine.

“Cabeswater,” Adam rasped, voice weak but certain.

“Why are you connected to Cabeswater II?”

“No. Not the new one. The old one.”

“Wait. I thought that forest is what saved poor old Richardman here?” Cheng said.

“If I were a sentient magical forest being destroyed,” Blue said, brow furrowed in thought, “I think I’d leave a few seeds behind.”

“I thought I felt it,” Adam admitted quietly. “For years, I’ve felt _something_ inside. Reaching back for me when I looked for it. I thought--” he closed his eyes with a shaky breath. Ronan pressed his lips to his forehead and rubbed his arm. “I thought I was making it up. Thought I just missed it too much, and was reading into something that wasn’t there.”

“A phantom limb,” Gansey said, thumb worrying his lower lip. “You could still feel its sensations, even after it was gone.”

“So Cabeswater left something behind in Parrish’s--what, exactly? Mind? Soul?” Henry asked.

Blue shrugged. “His hands and eyes? Who knows. Wherever it planted itself before is where it’s planted now.”

“I’ve been seeing things. Like I saw before. Pieces of the forest, but this time they were always shadows,” Adam said.

“So it was using Cabeswater, the original one, to pull itself into our world?” Henry asked.

“But where the fuck did it come from?” Ronan said. “And, also, the _fuck_ is it?”

They were silent for a moment. Adam closed his eyes, swallowing hard. “Blue, remember when we asked you about the fires?”

She nodded.

“You said the fires were messing with the ley line. Distorting readings and such.”

She blinked, then blinked again. Her eyes sparked with understanding. “You think it’s the fires?”

Adam adjusted himself to sit up a little more. Ronan shifted to match. “The ley line’s power is based in nature, right? I moved some rocks, lightning struck, and suddenly part of the line is restored. So what would happen if a natural disaster ran along the line, messed with parts of it, and turned it into a sort of live wire? Where would all that loose, destructive energy go?”

“It would try to find an outlet,” Gansey said excitedly, sitting on the edge of his chair. “A grounding point.”

“Electricity takes every path it can find. If the discharged energy from the ley line acts like electricity--”

“Then it would take every path it could. Which, in this case was you.”

“Not just me. Ronan’s dream things have been eaten recently. But only the things he’s made since the fires started.”

Gansey sat his wine glass down. “Because his dreams are also a path. Have you brought night horrors back?”

“No. Just--” he looked away. His fingers curled into a fist. “No. No night horrors.”

“Nightmares, though. Have you had those?”

Ronan took a deep breath and exhaled loudly. “Yes,” he said through gritted teeth.

“I think I’m more affected than he is,” Adam said, “Because Cabeswater is still inside me, somehow, somewhere. And it can use that opening and my energy to pull itself into physical forms.”

“The monster looked like your dad,” Ronan said. “It’s got that same black unmaking shit that came out of me.”

“It’s using my bad dreams for inspiration,” Adam said bitterly. “But mixed with whatever form it usually manifests in.”

“The big black dogs that appear around ley lines,” Blue noted.

“They’re not fucking dogs,” Ronan snapped. “They’re, like, big with spindly legs and blurry edges and glowing eyes. Fangs. Lots of tongues.”

“Maybe they’re fucked up from Adam’s unresolved emotional trauma, or have too much power and think a dog shape is too mundane. _I don’t know._ But that’s what they are.”

“Whatever. It doesn’t matter. Those _things_ are eating Lynch’s dream stuff,” Adam said. “I bet it’s because they can sense the same energy. They can tell where it came from, and are attracted to it.”

“And Lynch is tied to Cabeswater, right?” Henry said. “Wouldn’t that be a reason for this, too? If they find something familiar in their door in Parrish and the dream things of Lynch?”

“Yes, Henry! _Exactly right_ ,” Gansey cheered, jumping up from his seat. He cleared his throat, adjusted his glasses, and sat back down. “Yes. Right. Well. What do we do about this?”

The oven dinged. Henry excused himself.

“We close the door,” Blue said. “Sever the ties with Cabeswater, and cut off the entry point.”

“Scrying,” Adam croaked. Blue nodded.

“Ronan, too, I think. He’s still connected. He needs to be cut off, too.”

Adam frowned. He sank against Ronan’s side once more.

“Seems a bit dangerous, though. Given Adam’s state,” Gansey noted, thumb to his lip once more. “And that if the beast came from the door, who’s to say it would just let him in to close it off?”

“Corinne,” Ronan said, head tilting to look at Adam. Adam didn’t answer right away, gaze distant and unfocused. Ronan brushed a finger along his cheek. Adam flinched, blinked a few times, and then turned to Ronan. “Corinne could help,” Ronan said again. “Right? I don’t know what she did at the library but it was fucking sick.”

Adam nodded. “She’s a ward.”

“Who is Corinne?” Gansey said.

“What’s a ward?” Henry asked, returning with a glass of water for Adam.

“She _saw_ the thing?!” Blue cried.

Adam, halfway through taking a long sip of water, held up a silencing hand. “Corinne’s a friend from Yale. She deflects power in order to protect. She saved me. Saved _us,_ I guess, from the thing in the library.”

“She’s also a dick,” Ronan said, and Adam elbowed him in the ribs.

“Is she a sophomore, too?” Gansey said.

“No. Junior.”

“Wonder if she knows Michael Greene…”

“Who the fuck is that?” Ronan said.

“History scholar at Yale. Met him at a talk on Mesoamerican depictions of Quetzalcoatl last month in Boston. _Fascinating_ stuff, I tell you. The professor wasn’t much of a public speaker, but his evidence suggesting that the entirety of the development of Mexican civilization was predicated on the mythology of--”

Ronan groaned loudly enough to make Adam wince. “Shut _up,_ Dick.”

“So you just so _happened_ to meet another mystical being at your school of thirteen _thousand_ people?” Henry said incredulously. “Do you all just-- _attract_ strange and mystical people? Is that how this works?”

“No,” said Adam, at the same time Blue said, “Obviously.”

“Like energies attract like,” Blue said with a shrug.

“We just worked the same library shifts,” Adam said. “Not like I joined a damn club.”

“Is she still in New Haven?” Gansey asked.

“Think so. She’s from Kansas. I don’t think she planned on flying all the way home just for a couple days.”

“If she can protect you while you’re under, then we should be able to do this,” Blue said. She placed a hand on Adam’s ankle. “We’ll get you better.”

Gansey fistbumped both Ronan and Adam. “Just like old times. Nothing like a good war council to really brighten up the holidays.”

Ronan laughed sharply. “Only you would think that, Dick,” he said, but patted his shoulder and took a swing from his wine glass.

“Lasagna should be cooled and ready,” Henry announced. The meeting was adjourned. They gathered in the kitchen for dinner.

Adam slipped back upstairs.

  
  
  


####

  
  
  


Ronan gave him space. Forty-five minutes worth. And then he remembered Adam hadn’t eaten more than a few saltines in over a day, which meant Ronan was going to invade his space regardless.

The bedroom was dark, save for the sliver of light where Adam left the door ajar. He sat on the floor with his back against the bed, pushing his thumb over the soft skin of his palm over and over again.

Ronan didn’t say anything. He put the bowl of food on the dresser and sat next to Adam, not quite touching but close enough that if Adam wanted to, they could. Adam didn’t look at Ronan. He kept smoothing his palm.

Eventually, Adam’s hands dropped into his lap. For a long moment, he just looked at his hands, brow furrowed as if he’d never seen them before. He looked at Ronan. Ronan was already looking back.

With a long, unsteady breath, he laid his head on Ronan’s shoulder. Ronan took Adam’s hand and twined their fingers together. He kissed each knuckle, soft and sweet.  

Vulnerability was a fragile thing. Fragile like the field mice Ronan held to his cheek, or the butterflies around Aurora’s grave, or kissing Adam for the first time. Fragile like the tears that now rolled down Adam’s cheeks and into the dip of Ronan’s collarbone. It was a quiet confession: of fear, of grief, of not wanting to say goodbye. Adam’s heart ripped open, vulnerable and bare, for Ronan to hold and care for in his steady, tender hands. It was Adam asking Ronan to help him carry his pain for just a little while.

Ronan held his trembling hands tighter and pressed a long kiss into the top of his head.

Adam’s voice trembled as he whispered, “I don’t--”

“I know,” Ronan said. And he did. He didn’t want to say goodbye, either.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ah yes, enjoy decompressing from three chapters of emotional hell with this lame exposé chapter. It's all about balance, my friends.


	7. Chapter 7

Adam called Corinne. 

“Can you help?” he asked.

“Only if you pay me in Thanksgiving dinner,” she said, and that managed to get a little bit of a laugh out of Adam. “I’ll be there soon.”

Adam ate the cold lasagna. Ronan held his hand.

They reconvened in the living room. At five past ten Corinne arrived.  

“Before I do anything,” she said, dropping her backpack and duffel by the couch and pointing at Adam, “ _ you  _ need to tell me everything. And I mean,  _ everything _ .”

They all looked at one another. Gansey cleared his throat. “It’s, well, a bit of a lengthy--”

“Listen,” Corinne snapped. “I used up my black tourmaline ring just trying to contain that thing you unleashed in Sterling, _and_ I covered your ass when you disappeared during your shift, _and_ I got fucking grilled by campus safety about why the hell the third floor is a mess and all the fluorescences burst. So you can at least do me the courtesy of informing me about what the hell you, and him,” she pointed at Ronan, “and them,” she gestured at the others, “are.”

Gansey sighed. “You might be here a while.”

“I didn’t drive two hours in the middle of the night to  _ not  _ be here a while”

Blue brought her a beer. “You’ll need it,” she said.

They told her the story. Ronan’s first dream, Gansey’s first death, and Blue’s first prophecy. Noah’s death, Adam’s sacrifice, and Henry’s robobee. Cabeswater, Glendower, Gwenllian, Artemus. Welk and Kavinsky. Piper and Greenmantle. Opal. Aurora. The demon. Unmaking. Blue’s kiss. Gansey’s second death. Cabeswater’s sacrifice. The end.  

Corinne listened without interruption. She fidgeted with the bare chain around her neck, black ring gone and nothing yet replacing it. She gulped down the rest of her drink.

“You guys had a far more exciting senior year than I did,” she noted. “And you  _ still  _ made grades to get into Yale?”

Adam nodded, smile small but proud. Ronan knocked his shoulder with a smile of his own.

Corinne raised her glass to him. “So. You need me to protect you? While you--what? Dream a fix for this?”

“Sort of. We can...inhabit the same space when he’s dreaming and I’m scrying. That’s usually where we need to go.”

“But with the big bad monster around--”

“We’re worried it’ll kill us.”

“Or worse,” Ronan said.

“Can you help?” Gansey asked, buttering his tone in his impossible-to-say-no-to way.

Corinne sighed. “I mean, sure? Look, most of the stuff my family and I ward are physical manifestations. Like, poltergeists, bad auras, psychotic exes--those sorts of things. I’ve never  _ tried  _ to do something in someone’s  _ mind. _ ”

“Have you ever scryed?” Blue asked.

“Nope,” Corinne said. “I’m not strong enough. But, I guess with you as an amplifier…”

Corinne reached for Blue’s hand. Blue gave it. The second they touched the air shifted, everything suddenly brighter, crisper, clearer. Calmer. Like they were in a bubble.

Corinne exhaled and let go. It faded instantly. Everyone slumped just a little bit more.

“Jeeze,” Corinne said, shaking her hand like it had been burned. She turned to Gansey. “No wonder she killed you.”

Blue kissed him on the cheek. “Whoops,” she said. Gansey blushed.

Henry cleared his throat. “So?”

“Yeah. Yes. I can try. I think it’ll work if she’s helping,” Corinne said.

“What do we need to do?”

Corinne opened her duffel bag. “I’ll need space. A lot of it.”

  
  
  


#####

  
  
  


The dining room was the largest space with the least amount of furniture. 

Henry and Ronan carried table and chairs into different rooms, while Gansey delicately removed the china from its glass-window cabinet. Blue called Maura one last time, phone shoved between her ear and shoulder as she filled a metal bowl with water for Adam. “Don’t die,” was her best piece of advice. “And ask what’s-her-face for her opinions on salt.”

Adam stayed on the couch, arms wrapped around his stomach and expression pinched. He shivered beneath the blanket Ronan laid across him.

Corinne sat on the floor, thumbing through an old book. She held the necklace chain to her lips, brow furrowed in the thought.

She flipped forward a few pages, and dug around in the duffel bag full of crystals, salt, candles, incense, and charcoal.

“What’s it all do?” Adam rasped, squinting at her from the couch.

Corinne looked up from the book. “Depends. Some amplifies what I can already do. Some helps make it all cleaner. Some trap things when I need to. Bad stuff’s gotta go somewhere.”

“Is it all necessary?”

She pulled at the necklace chain. “Warding is...complicated,” she said. “Different circumstances require different methods. I can push bad things away, I can trap them, I can diffuse, I can create a barrier between you and it--it just depends on what you need.”

Chainsaw swooped into the room with a croak. She landed on the arm of the couch, and nestled her head into Adam’s neck with a sound close to a purr. He squirmed, but smiled, brushing her feather with the edge of his finger. Ronan set a glass of water on the table beside him. He shooed Chainsaw from her perch so he could lay a hand to Adam’s forehead and cheek and comb his fingers through Adam’s hair. Neither said a word. Ronan kissed his hand and walked out of the room.

“It’s hard to find people who understand, who can do this with you,” Corinne said softly, chin resting on her knee with the other leg tucked beneath. “You guys are lucky.”

Adam smiled weakly. “We are.”

Chainsaw cawed in agreement.

“Is she dreamed?” Corinne asked suddenly.

Adam nodded.

“He can dream up a goddamn living creature, and he couldn’t do me the courtesy of dreaming her a stupid little  _ vest _ ?”

Chainsaw pushed off the sofa to nip at Corinne’s ear. She wacked her in the face with her wing-- _ very  _ intentionally--as she flew off to follow Ronan.

Adam exhaled a thready laugh. “He tried to make her wear a princess hat for Halloween once. Didn’t go over well.”

Corinne scoffed. “Clearly.” She turned back to her book, but it didn’t look like she was reading it anymore.

“The room’s ready,” Gansey announced.

Corinne gathered up her belongings. She spent a long few minutes staring at the empty space, brow furrowed and eyes narrowed. Thinking.

She toed off her sneakers and socks, and heel-toed around the room in a circle, placing a tealight at four points to define the shape. Blue lit a charcoal disc and placed in a ceramic pot, sprinkling incense and sage on top before closing it up and placing it in the center. Gansey lit each of the candles in the circle. Henry place the bowl of water and a pillow on opposite ends of the circle. Corinne took a deep breath. The room already smelled like the herbs.

Every single one of them would swear up and down that they saw something around Corinne pulse as she inhaled and exhaled.

Corinne sat cross-legged in her place in the circle, to form a triangle with Ronan and Adam. “Ready?” she asked.

Ronan helped Adam sit in front of the bowl. They kissed once, twice. Tender and sweet. Ronan sat with the pillow.

Corinne laid three items in front of her: a pile of sea salt, a jet black crystal that shone just like her necklace did, and a tall black candle. She instructed Henry to place a similar candle in front of Adam and Ronan.

“Purifier,” she explained, pointing at the salt. The to the crystal: “Black Tourmaline: absorbs band stuff,” and to the candle, “black for protection and repelling. Helps with grounding, too, so might help get us back.”

Corinne took a deep breath. Her hands shook.

Gansey stood by Adam; Cheng by Lynch. Blue sat next to Corinne. Guardians, just in case.

Blue took Corinne’s hand and held it tight.

“You two go first,” Corinne instructed. “Light the candles when you get there. I’ll follow.”

Ronan and Adam nodded.

“See you there,” Lynch said, head on the pillow and eyes already slipping closed.

Adam took a deep breath and stared into the silver bowl. Still water, smooth as glass, candlelight flickering around the edges of the deep, black pool as he fell and fell and fell--

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


When he landed--

Where  _ did  _ he land, exactly? Black everything. No walls. No floor, expect for a perfect reflection of himself beneath him. Like he was standing on a mirror. Or water. Everything else was vacant. Empty. Void.  

It set his teeth on edge, made his heart flutter a little faster. He swallowed.

“Hi there, handsome. Come here often?”

Ronan appeared behind him, grinning wickedly with his hands shoved in his pockets. Blue eyes shining brighter, as they so often did in this dreamworld.

“Asshole,” Adam muttered, steadying his heart with a smack to Ronan’s chest.

“Think this is the place?” Ronan said, all serious.

“Don’t know where else we’d be.”

“But there’s nothing fucking here.”

Adam nearly agreed. Then he felt it. Or, heard it. Water drops. Rustling leaves. Cracks of a burning log.

There was  _ something  _ here. Adam just didn’t know what. His fist tightened around something smooth. Waxy. The candle.

“She told us to light it,” Adam noted, holding his up and nodding to the one in Ronan’s hand.

Ronan held his up, sharp brows furrowed. “How--”

The candles lit without a spark. Neither seemed surprised.

“Is this what this always looks like?” Corinne said, appearing suddenly between them. Both of them jumped.

“Jesus  _ fuck, _ ” Ronan hissed. Corinne laughed. She stretched her fingers out in front of her, tapped her toes to the ground. Or, mirror. Whatever they were standing on.  

“Normally there’s a forest,” Adam said.

“Smells like it,” Corinne said. And she was right. Like trees after rain, like renewing mulch, like wildflowers and hickory.

“Smells like smoke, too,” Ronan said.

“Bet if we follow it, we’ll find whatever you’re looking for.”

They walked. Each step rippled through the mirror. The smoke grew thicker.

It didn’t take long. At least, it didn’t feel like a long time. Time was always hard to track in this place. They could have been walking for second, minutes, hours, years until they reached the dome. Black brambles and vines, thick as tree trunks, woven together so tightly that from a it appeared to be a solid object. Leaves sprouted, bloomed, and died. Vines unfurled and curled into the gaps they could find.

“What’s it protecting?” Ronan asked. His voice echoed strangely in this place. Like they were under water.

“I don’t think it’s protecting anything,” Corinne said. She squinted her eyes, and took a few more steps forward. “I think it’s trying to get in.”

Adam closed his eyes and took a deep breath. He reached for Cabeswater, extended his hands and eyes for it once more.

“Oh shit,” Ronna muttered. A green vine burst forth from between two black brambles. It reached to the black sky, wound itself around the thorns and poisoned leaves, constricted until the vine withered and died. Beneath the black rot, there were flowers. Vibrant green leaves. Thick, healthy branches.

Shadowed vines hissed. Lunged. Filled the new hole in the blink of an eye, writhing and twisting like snakes.

Adam flinched and opened his eyes. “That’s it. It’s in there.”

They stepped forward.

The world groaned. Stones cracking and falling and rending the earth in two.

It appeared. Too many stories tall, a monster of harsh lines and crooked vines, too many eyes shining in the dark, too many legs; saw blade teeth crammed into its mouth; tongues dripping with inky saliva and rot; snout stretched too far. It growled like a landslide.

“Well fuck me,” Ronan hissed. “It  _ is _ a goddamn dog.”

Adam shivered. “It’s worse here” he whispered, arms wrapped around himself. “Corinne?”

Her gaze narrowed. “I can imagine whatever I want in here, right? That’s how this works?”

“Sort of--”

“It likes Latin,” Ronan said. “You ask for things in Latin.”

“I don’t know Latin,” Corinne said. “Do you?”

“Yes,” they replied.

Corinne clearly had questions about that, but instead said, “How do you say ‘Bind it up with--’”

She didn’t need to finish. Glowing, glittering black chains burst from the darkness. They wrapped the monster and dug deep into its thorny flesh. It howled furiously.

“The hell?” Ronan hissed.  

“Cool,” Corinne said, smile sharp. “This’ll be fun.” She turned to Adam and Ronan. “Once you can get in, go. I’ll keep it busy.”

She took off, muscles pumping, sprinting--no,  _ flying-- _ across the black mirror plain before them. The beast flexed. The chains shattered. It lunged.

She caught it. Both hands, grabbing its snout. Her feet slide back by the force of it, heels running into the ground until she locked her stance and, with a shout, stopped it. It snarled and gnashed its teeth and lashed her with serrated, pointed tongues.

Corinne shouted into the abyss. Black crystals exploded from the shadows, skewering through the beast’s arms and torso and neck. The chain reappeared to gag its mouth. It hissed and screamed and thrashed against its bonds, but Corinne didn’t waver.

Adam reached for Cabeswater once more. Two green vines cut through the black, carving away an opening. A faint light glowed from within.

Adam and Ronan rushed forward. Adam stopped by Corinne. “Are you okay?” he asked, shouting about the furious wails of the beast.

Corinne’s arms were shaking, and sweat clung to her brow. She looked at Adam; her eyes glowed. The same white light he thought he’d seen in the library, and in the house. The air around her smelled like sea salt and sage.

“I’ll be okay. Go,” she said.

He nodded. Ronan was waiting for him at the entrance.

Together, they ran into the vines. The dome wove shut behind them, all sounds from the outside suddenly ceasing. It was quiet, except for Adam and Ronan’s deep, heaving breaths. And humming. A familiar voice. A familiar song.

Adam looked to Ronan. Ronan stared straight ahead, eyes wide and brow pinched. He swallowed. Adam uncurled the fist at Ronan’s side by weaving their fingers together. They took the first step together. And the second. Third, fourth, and fifth. Towards the warm and fluttering heartbeat at the end of this tunnel of vines, where Aurora Lynch stood by a withering sapling.

Ronan’s breath caught in his throat. He squeezed Adam’s hand.

Aurora’s white dress was torn and stained, splattered with mud and grass, fabric worn thin and lace tearing at the seams. She held the brittle branches of the tree with her long and careful fingers, whispering a song to it. The song that played at her grave.

“Mom?” Ronan whispered. But Aurora didn’t hear him.

Ronan’s hands were shaking in his grip. Fighting through grief and guilt, watching a shade of his mother hum her song and pet the withering leaves of the tree.

_ It was my fault. _

It whispered in Adam’s deaf ear. Ronan’s deepest fear.

They’d had this conversation so many times, in so many different ways. Ronan thought that he should have taken her out of Cabeswater, sooner. Shouldn’t have brought her in to begin with. Shouldn’t have dreamed Cabeswater at all.

But before the demon, she had been happy. Cabeswater had been beautiful. And that was all Ronan’s doing. Adam hoped that, one day, Ronan would understand. That he would let himself be okay again.  

He exhaled, and Adam could feel the weight falling from his shoulders. Absolved of his guilt, maybe not forever, but at least for this moment. A final gift from his forest.

“Mom,” Ronan said, voice rough and trembling. He wiped his cheek with the back of his hand.

Again, Aurora didn’t hear him. Or, maybe she  _ couldn’t  _ hear him. Neither she nor the boy in the ripped Coca-Cola shirt and camo pants beside her seemed to notice there were other people here.

Adam’s heart skipped. He knew that shirt. His shirt.  _ Coca-Cola. _

He’d gotten rid of it a while ago. Too many stains and rips and a smell that just wouldn’t come out no matter how long it soaked. But somehow this kid ended up with it--

No. No, it wasn’t just  _ some kid. _

It was Adam.

Home-cut fair hair, oil-stained fingers, collarbone and cheekbones and wrist bones jutting at odd and uncomfortable angles. Ugly purple and sickly green stretched like a watercolor beneath his one eye, yellow blotched across his nose and eyelid. His expression was pinched and serious as he pruned the brown leaves of the dying tree, eyes gleaming with fierce pride and quiet strength and ferocious determination.

He must be sixteen. No, seventeen. Adam recognized that bruise. It was the last bruise before his ear. Before he left. Before he gave himself to the forest. Before he became something  _ more. _

Ronan’s grip tightened.

Why was he here?

Adam closed his eyes and tried to take an even, steady breath. He reached for Cabeswater. And Cabeswater answered. The tiny sapling trembled as Cabeswater exhaled. A branch grew from its thin trunk, budding and blooming a waxy green leaf. Like it was pointing at Adam. No, not pointing. Reaching. Reaching for  _ him _ , it’s Magician.

But the branch turned grey and the leaf withered away too soon. The tree sagged. Its caretakers moved closer to hold the frail little tree steady.

It couldn’t live, Adam realized. It had remembered its caretakers: its magician and its mother. Manifested memories, shades who could tend and protect it. Its brown leaves turned green in their pale hands, cracked soil soaked up the water that was left by their bare feet. But it never lasted. The seed it left, the memory that Adam had buried deep down where he wouldn’t have to face it, couldn’t live anymore.

It clung to them, to its Greywaren and Magician, trying to help them. After all this time, it had held onto Adam and Ronan just as they had held onto it. Neither had been willing to truly say goodbye. And because of that, they’d left open a door. Left it to be corrupted and hurt once more.

They had to let it go.  _ Adam  _ had to let it go. But...he didn’t  _ want  _ to. This magical, uncanny forest had protected and loved him when he didn’t think himself worthy of such things. What would he be without it?

He thought, for a long time, that his worth was tied to Cabeswater. That all of them--Gansey, Blue, Henry, even Ronan--would leave him once it was gone. Once he was no longer its Magician.

_ What if Ronan only liked me when I was special? When I was like him. _

And Adam realized his fears were whispered aloud, too, once Ronan turned to him with a face full of heartbreak. An expression Adam had seen before, when he said things about himself that were horrible and true, when he felt like touch and kindness weren’t things he deserved.  _ How can I make sure you will never feel less than ever again? _

“Cabeswater felt like home,” Adam said. He watched his younger self press the dried dirt ar the base of the tree. “Like someone was  _ there  _ when I felt the most alone. When I least wanted help. I--didn’t  _ like  _ that, back then. But I needed to learn, didn’t I? I needed to learn how to not be alone. I loved it, after a while. After it protected me, held me, kept me and Opal and Aurora safe. After it saved your life.

“And then, the demon. I couldn’t stop it. And then it just-- _ disappeared _ . And...I worried that once I was empty, I wouldn’t--that you might...that you’d think it was my fault, all of it, and...” He released a shaking breath. Didn’t realize he’d balled his hands into fists until Ronan uncurled them with gentle fingers and kissed his knuckles.

Cabeswater had been the teacher, but Cabeswater never meant to be the companion. Ronan was. Ronan, who danced with him at shitty college parties, and ate diner food with him. Ronan, who liked to make out with him in cars, and who never once questioned their distance or Adam’s loyalty or his enormous dreams. Ronan, who made him feel worthy and loved and important and special with every kiss, every gift, every touch, every laugh. Ronan, who helped Adam find joy and comfort and beauty in a world that had so often hidden those gifts from him. Ronan, who let him be loud. Who let him be  _ Adam. _

It wasn’t just Ronan, though. No, it was never  _ just  _ Ronan. It was Blue. And Gansey. And Henry, and Noah. Corinne, and Colton, and Julie, too. Maura and Calla. Dean. Matthew. Declan, even. His roommates, his study group, his residential college, his professors.

A network of roots to form his support. That protected and loved and cared for and nurtured and taught him. That told him every day, in their own unique ways, that he was worthy.

A forest grown from the roots of one tree doesn’t fall along with the first. The rest of the trees live. The rest of the trees continue to grow.

Adam looked at his younger self, and found him looking back. Blue eyes hard and defiant. Jaw set, shoulders hunched. Afraid but unwilling to bend.

He was no longer that person. And that, he realized, was okay. It was okay to have grown from the mistakes and choices he’d made at 17. To have learned from them. To forgive himself for opening the door, and to be happy with the good that came of it.

He hoped that this young, bony, bruised yet proud boy knew that he would be okay. That he was allowed to say goodbye to the things that hurt him. That he was allowed to feel hurt and sad and angry when his parents called. That he was allowed to feel hurt and sad and angry about the things he’d lost, the things he’d never been allowed.

He hoped that this young boy knew he was allowed to grieve. That he was allowed to move on.

It was okay to grieve. It was okay to move on.

Adam closed his eyes and let the weight of that lift from his shoulders. He was okay. He would be okay. And Cabeswater would be okay, too.

Because Cabeswater, he knew, couldn’t live like this. They both needed to let each other go. Cabeswater needed to be free. Adam needed to finally let go of the guilt, the pain, the grief.

He was allowed to grieve. He was allowed to move on. He was allowed to be okay.

A tear slipped down his cheek. Another fell as he blinked open his eyes.

Aurora and Young Adam were watching them. Waiting.

A voice called through the quiet. “Adam?” it said, strained and hoarse. “I can’t hold it much longer.”

Corinne. Right.

It was time. He and Ronan closed their eyes.

Adam thanked Cabeswater once more, and he let the tears well and fall to the ground. He would be okay. And if he wasn’t right now, that was okay, too.

A breeze whispered past them; a petrichor and wildflower sigh of relief. It brushed a tear from Adam’s cheek, ruffled his hair, traced the shell of his left ear, and then…

Silence.

It was done.

Deep breath in. Deep breath out.

It was time to wake up.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you're curious, I imagine the song Aurora sings to be "Moon Cradle" by Loreena McKennitt. 
> 
> Epilogue is all that's left, folks!


	8. Epilogue

Life moved on. 

Yale attributed the popped fluorescents and strobe light show to a defunct substation line. Rumors spread that it was one of the secret societies performing an initiation. Ghosts of New Haven featured it on their website. A Youtube channel about urban legends picked up a cell phone video of the flickering lights and it got half a million views.

Everyone talked about it the first few days back from Thanksgiving. But then a fraternity brother made a “secret party” a public event on Facebook (which got the chapter suspended), and then someone discovered a new app where you could anonymously ask people questions, and then it was finals, and by the time school closed for winter break everyone forgot the electrical issue ever happened.

Adam got straight As. Again. No one was surprised. Ronan celebrated with him anyways when he returned to the Barns: a great reason to use his  _ Nice Date--Ronan Pays--Adam Doesn’t Complain  _ coupon, and tell him how fucking smart and great and amazing and perfect he was while celebrating in bed with him that night.

Yale Men’s Soccer did not make it to the finals, but Women’s Volleyball made it to the third round of theirs. Adam and Colton were able to go to a game and cheer them on, and Ronan only made one snarky comment about him suddenly liking sports now. Corinne was named team captain for the upcoming season. Ronan registered Chainsaw as an Emotional Support Animal and had Adam text Corinne his authentic paperwork. Corinne had Adam text Ronan a photo of her flipping him off.

Gansey and Henry survived their first semester at Harvard, and managed to  _ not  _ get involved in any high-stakes supernatural quests. Blue made a teapot in her ceramics class that the professor called a “creative interpretation” but gave her passing marks anyways, because she didn’t specify in the syllabus that the final project needed to function.

Matthew was accepted Early Decision to James Madison University, with an athletic scholarship for lacrosse. Ronan would have been proud of him regardless, but Adam knew that extra bit of enthusiasm came from knowing Matthew would be close to home.

Ronan caught Declan looking at engagement rings on his phone before Mass the second Sunday in Advent. Apparently he was considering proposing to Ashley.  _ Considering.  _ Ronan, for one, would believe it when he fucking saw it.   

And then it was Christmas. One month since the library. It felt like yesterday. It also felt like years ago. Time was such a tricky thing.

The Lynches and Adam went Midnight Mass, sang “Silent Night” in candlelight, and opened one present each upon returning home. Declan and Matthew went to bed. Adam and Ronan cozied together on the couch, sipping mulled wine with their legs tangled together beneath one of Aurora’s quilts.

They turned off all the lights except for the colored strings around the plump Christmas tree (which was covered in too much tinsel, according the Adam, but Ronan declared that opinion was objectively wrong, and he and Matthew outvoted Adam because this was a “democratic-as-fuck household”).

The woodstove burned, bright and warm. Celtic Christmas hymns wove dreamily through the house.

“I’m happy,” Adam said suddenly, resting his cheek against the back of the couch. He remembered, a long time ago, when he and Ronan sat like this in the pews of St. Agnes. Back when they were just  _ something,  _ instead of  _ something together. _

“‘Tis the season,” Ronan replied, but he smiled. “Most wonderful time of the year and shit.”

“Asshole,” Adam grumbled, and shoved his shoulder. Ronan cursed. “Watch the fucking wine, Parrish.”

They sat in comfortable silence for a while. The fire crackled. The house creaked. The wine was warm and spicy and would, eventually, lull them both to sleep.

“You call that therapist?” Ronan asked, watching Chainsaw peck at the fake fur of Declan’s stocking and rummage through its contents; tomorrow, Ronan would claim he developed “selective blindness”, which he defined as “being physically incapable of seeing when something messes with Declan’s shit.”

The therapist was recommendation from Maura: someone she’d met at a conference once. A woman with a connection to the supernatural and uncanny, as well as a legitimate degree in psychology and counseling. Her practices were, supposedly, far more mundane than one might expect, but Adam liked “mundane.” He had enough things in his head, and really didn’t want any more. But at least he could be honest with her. Wouldn’t need to talk around all the weird and traumatizing shit he’d been through. That was a comfort, and it’s what convinced him to talk to her.

“Yeah. Starting after break.”

“How do you feel about it?”

Adam shrugged. “Nervous,” he admitted. “But I think I need it. Corinne also wants to take me running,” he said after a sip from his mug. “Apparently endorphins are good for you, or something.”

“Lame,” Ronan said.

“Might also get another plant,” Adam said with a wry smile. Ronan snorted.

“I’m happy, too,” Ronan said after a long, quiet moment. Firelight and wine and Adam’s body tangled with his made his voice gentle and soft. “And I love you. And if you ever start getting creepy fucking texts from a forest again and  _ don’t  _ tell me, I’ll still love you, but I also might fucking murder you.”

Adam laughed, uninhibited and genuine. Ronan’s favorite sound in the world.

Adam took another sip. Ronan drummed his fingers against the mug. “I’ve been thinking--about going to Ireland,” he mumbled, as if afraid to pull the words into reality. Adam reached a hand across the top of the couch. Ronan delicately traced the long lines of his fingers. “I want to figure out what happened when my dad was there. Where he came from. What he was running from. Why’d he end up here, of all places.”

“I’ll be waiting for you when you come back,” Adam said.Ronan wound their fingers together and kissed his knuckles. “I’ll make an airport sign and everything. Maybe balloons, though I don’t know if you’re worth the price of helium.”

Ronan licked the palm of his hand. Adam shook his hand away with a grimace.  

The ley line was healing. They were both healing. Things were normal. Quiet. Simple, and easy.

It wouldn’t stay that way, because life never did. Not when you’re a Magician and the Greywaren. Long roads stretched before them, both the paths they took together and the ones they had to walk alone, full of bumps and twists and unexpected blocks. Who knows what they’d stumble upon tomorrow.

Tonight, at least, they settled into each other in the warm firelight without fear or worry. And whenever the next thing would come--be it demons, dead kings, other dreamers, or maybe just disagreements--they would be ready. They’d face it together.

Because that was the point of this. Of them. To do this shit together.

And both of them were happy with that.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Love this so much you wish there were pictures and a playlist to go with it?? WELL IT'S YOUR LUCKY DAY. 
> 
> Check out this [ beautiful artwork by Kay ](https://cosmiccluck.tumblr.com/post/184412086522/blows-a-wonky-fanfare-hello-welcome-to-my) (cosmiccluck.tumblr.com) and [ listen to this playlist. ](https://open.spotify.com/user/seholland92/playlist/4JCKq6x8Fu0S6FzvmTC4xB?si=RrmRwalpRc2uK9YARzpoRw)
> 
> Thanks for reading, friends!


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